Measurement of Acetabular Cartilage Thickness with Ct Arthrography: Accuracy of Three-dimensional Reconstructions

ACCURACY OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL RECONSTRUCTIONS Allen, B C; Peters, C L; Brown, NAT; +Anderson, A E; +Department of Orthopaedics; Department of Bioengineering; Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT Senior author: [email protected] INTRODUCTION: Noninvasive or minimally-invasive techniques that allow accurate reproduction of acetabular cartilage thickness in vivo could assist with surgical planning for osteochondroplasty, allow precise quantification of cartilage loss for longitudinal studies, and provide guidelines for interpreting biomechanical models. Current techniques to estimate cartilage thickness in vivo use 3D reconstructions from CT or MR image data. CT arthrography has been shown to have superior accuracy for measuring cartilage thickness in the ankle [1], but its accuracy for imaging hip cartilage has not been assessed. Due to its highly curved geometry, imaging of hip cartilage with CT may be prone to error due to volumetric averaging (i.e. staircase artifact). Computational methods employed to date use custom algorithms and software to estimate thickness, which are not readily available for direct clinical application. The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of hip joint cartilage thickness estimated from reconstructions made by segmentation of CT arthrography data using commercial software.