Computer-Aided Diagnosis in Phase Contrast Imaging X-Ray Computed Tomography for Quantitative Characterization of ex vivo Human Patellar Cartilage

Visualization of ex vivo human patellar cartilage matrix through the phase contrast imaging X-ray computed tomography (PCI-CT) has been previously demonstrated. Such studies revealed osteoarthritis-induced changes to chondrocyte organization in the radial zone. This study investigates the application of texture analysis to characterizing such chondrocyte patterns in the presence and absence of osteoarthritic damage. Texture features derived from Minkowski functionals (MF) and gray-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) were extracted from 842 regions of interest (ROI) annotated on PCI-CT images of ex vivo human patellar cartilage specimens. These texture features were subsequently used in a machine learning task with support vector regression to classify ROIs as healthy or osteoarthritic; classification performance was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). The best classification performance was observed with the MF features perimeter (AUC: 0.94 ±0.08) and “Euler characteristic” (AUC: 0.94 ± 0.07), and GLCM-derived feature “Correlation” (AUC: 0.93 ± 0.07). These results suggest that such texture features can provide a detailed characterization of the chondrocyte organization in the cartilage matrix, enabling classification of cartilage as healthy or osteoarthritic with high accuracy.