Automatic quantification of bone marrow edema on MRI of the wrist in patients with early arthritis: A feasibility study

PURPOSE: To investigate the feasibility of automatic quantification of bone marrow edema (BME) on MRI of the wrist in patients with early arthritis. METHODS: For 485 early arthritis patients (clinically confirmed arthritis of one or more joints, symptoms for less than 2 years), MR scans of the wrist were processed in three automatic stages. First, super‐resolution reconstruction was applied to fuse coronal and axial scans into a single high‐resolution 3D image. Next, the carpal bones were located and delineated using atlas‐based segmentation. Finally, the extent of BME within each bone was quantified by identifying image intensity values characteristic of BME by fuzzy clustering and measuring the fraction of voxels with these characteristic intensities within each bone. Correlation with visual BME scores was assessed through Pearson correlation coefficient. RESULTS: Pearson correlation between quantitative and visual BME scores across 485 patients was r=0.83, P<0.001. CONCLUSIONS: Quantitative measurement of BME on MRI of the wrist has the potential to provide a feasible alternative to visual scoring. Complete automation requires automatic detection and compensation of acquisition artifacts. Magn Reson Med 79:1127–1134, 2018. © 2017 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.