A method framework of cruciate ligaments segmentation and reconstruction from MRI images.

Abstract

Segmenting anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments (ACL/PCL) presents challenges in medical imaging due to diverse characteristics, including size, shape, and intensity. Our study uses superpixel-based spectral clustering for knee cruciate ligament segmentation in 2D DICOM slices, renowned for generating high-quality clusters. The proposed method addresses the challenges by (i) identifying the ligamentous region (ROI) through superpixel-based computation, (ii) extracting features (intensity-based, shape-based, geometric complexity, and Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) from the ROI, and (iii) segmenting knee ligament tissues using spectral clustering on the extracted features. Superpixel-based spectral clustering addresses the challenge of constructing a dense similarity matrix and significantly reduces the computational burden. Furthermore, 3D visualization of ligament structures is performed using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). We evaluated our proposed approach on a dataset of knee MRI slices, assessing the results via the dice score, average surface distance (ASD), and root mean squared error (RMSE) metrics. Our method achieved an average dice score of 0.912 for ACL segmentation and 0.896 for PCL segmentation, outperforming other clustering methods. These scores showed an enhancement of 10.7% and 14.9% in segmentation accuracy for the ACL and PCL, respectively. Furthermore, reduced error margins were demonstrated with the mean ASD values of 1.60 and 1.78 and the mean RMSE values of 1.76 and 1.86 for ACL and PCL, respectively. These results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for cruciate ligament segmentation and its potential for increasing the segmentation accuracy and speed, offering significant advantages over manual segmentation by reducing time and expertise.