Automatic quantification of bone marrow edema on MRI of the wrist in patients with early arthritis

Automatic quantification of bone marrow edema on MRI of the wrist in patients with early arthritis: A feasibility study

Aizenberg, Evgeni (Leiden University Medical Center)
Roex, Edgar A.H. (Leiden University Medical Center)
Nieuwenhuis, Wouter P. (Leiden University Medical Center)
Mangnus, Lukas (Leiden University Medical Center)
van der Helm-Mil, Annette H.M. (Leiden University Medical Center)
Reijnierse, Monique (Leiden University Medical Center)
Bloem, Johan L. (Leiden University Medical Center)
Lelieveldt, B.P.F. (TU Delft Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics; Leiden University Medical Center)
Stoel, Berend G. (Leiden University Medical Center)

2018

Purpose: To investigate the feasibility of automatic quantification of bone marrow edema (BME) on MRI of the wrist in patients with early arthritis.
Methods: For 485 early arthritis patients (clinically confirmed arthritis of one or more joints, symptoms for less than 2 years), MR scans of the wrist were processed in three automatic stages. First, super-resolution reconstruction was applied to fuse coronal and axial scans into a single high-resolution 3D image. Next, the carpal bones were located and delineated using atlas-based segmentation. Finally, the extent of BME within each bone was quantified by identifying image intensity values characteristic of BME by fuzzy clustering and measuring the fraction of voxels with these characteristic intensities within each bone. Correlation with visual BME scores was assessed through Pearson correlation coefficient.
Results: Pearson correlation between quantitative and visual BME scores across 485 patients was r=0.83, P<0.001. Conclusions: Quantitative measurement of BME on MRI of the wrist has the potential to provide a feasible alternative to visual scoring. Complete automation requires automatic detection and compensation of acquisition artifacts.

Atlas-based segmentation
Bone marrow edema
Inflammation
Rheumatoid arthritis
Superresolution reconstruction

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:638b24f5-fb18-440b-9c9a-836057db069e

https://doi.org/10.1002/mrm.26712

0740-3194

Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 79 (2), 1127-1134

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2018 Evgeni Aizenberg, Edgar A.H. Roex, Wouter P. Nieuwenhuis, Lukas Mangnus, Annette H.M. van der Helm-Mil, Monique Reijnierse, Johan L. Bloem, B.P.F. Lelieveldt, Berend G. Stoel