title: Cartilage thickness measurements from optical coherence tomography.
abstract: We describe a new semiautomatic image processing method for detecting the cartilage boundaries in optical coherence tomography (OCT). In particular, we focus on rabbit cartilage since this is an important animal model for testing both chondroprotective agents and cartilage repair techniques. The novel boundary-detection system presented here consists of (1) an adaptive filtering technique for image enhancement and speckle reduction, (2) edge detection, and (3) edge linking by graph searching. The procedure requires several steps and can be automated. The quantitative measurements of cartilage thickness on OCT images correlated well with measurements from histology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Orthopedics, Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
authors.forename: Jadwiga
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rogowska
authors.forename: Clifford M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Bryant
authors.forename: Mark E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Brezinski
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D002358:Cartilage, Articular / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D007719:Knee Joint; D055095:Optics and Photonics; D011817:Rabbits; D014054:Tomography