  The automatic segmentation of human knee cartilage from 3D MR images is a
useful yet challenging task due to the thin sheet structure of the cartilage
with diffuse boundaries and inhomogeneous intensities. In this paper, we
present an iterative multi-class learning method to segment the femoral, tibial
and patellar cartilage simultaneously, which effectively exploits the spatial
contextual constraints between bone and cartilage, and also between different
cartilages. First, based on the fact that the cartilage grows in only certain
area of the corresponding bone surface, we extract the distance features of not
only to the surface of the bone, but more informatively, to the densely
registered anatomical landmarks on the bone surface. Second, we introduce a set
of iterative discriminative classifiers that at each iteration, probability
comparison features are constructed from the class confidence maps derived by
previously learned classifiers. These features automatically embed the semantic
context information between different cartilages of interest. Validated on a
total of 176 volumes from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) dataset, the
proposed approach demonstrates high robustness and accuracy of segmentation in
comparison with existing state-of-the-art MR cartilage segmentation methods.
