Analyzing Femorotibial Cartilage Thickness Using Anatomically Standardized Maps: Reproducibility and Reference Data

Journal of Clinical Medicine

ThomasP. Andriacchi¹  Katerina Blazek¹  Alessandro Cavinato²  BrigitteM. Jolles²  Hugo Babel²  Julien Favre² 

[1] Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA;Swiss BioMotion Lab, Department of Musculoskeletal Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne (CHUV-UNIL), CH-1011 Lausanne, Switzerland;

关键词: cartilage;    knee;    morphology;    osteoarthritis;    registration;    pattern;   

DOI  :  10.3390/jcm10030461

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Alterations in cartilage thickness (CTh) are a hallmark of knee osteoarthritis, which remain difficult to characterize at high resolution, even with modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), due to a paucity of standardization tools. This study aimed to assess a computational anatomy method producing standardized two-dimensional femorotibial CTh maps. The method was assessed with twenty knees, processed following three common experimental scenarios. Cartilage thickness maps were obtained for the femorotibial cartilages by reconstructing bone and cartilage mesh models in tree-dimension, calculating three-dimensional CTh maps, and anatomically standardizing the maps. The intra-operator accuracy (median (interquartile range, IQR) of −0.006 (0.045) mm), precision (0.152 (0.070) mm), entropy (7.02 (0.71) and agreement (0.975 (0.020))) results suggested that the method is adequate to capture the spatial variations in CTh and compare knees at varying osteoarthritis stages. The lower inter-operator precision (0.496 (0.132) mm) and agreement (0.808 (0.108)) indicate a possible loss of sensitivity to detect differences in a setting with multiple operators. The results confirmed the promising potential of anatomically standardized maps, with the lower inter-operator reproducibility stressing the need to coordinate operators. This study also provided essential reference data and indications for future research using CTh maps.

【 授权许可】

Unknown