Cartilage-defect assessment by measuring thickness of knee MRI: Data from the osteoarthritis initiative

In this paper, we present a knee cartilage assessment technique to differentiate those in different osteoarthritis grades. We construct atlas for each grade and each atlas represents an average size of cartilage thickness. We build the atlas using manual segmentation of patellar cartilage following groupwise registration. We assign thickness value at the voxels in bone-cartilage interface in ahead. The thickness atlas is used for t-test to see how our method is accurate. T-test result shows our method finds significant difference between osteoarthritis grade 0 and 4 with p less than 0.001.