Extraction and 3D visualization of the posterior cruciate ligament in MRI studies

Abstract This paper shows a method which locates the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) on the T1-weighted MRI knee images and in the second step permits 3D visualization of the PCL structures. The proposed method of location of the posterior cruciate ligament on the T1-weighted MR knee images is based on entropy (or energy) measure of fuzziness and fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm with median modification. On the basis of the analysis of each profile in every slice of the MRI knee T1-weighted after fuzzyfication and fuzzy clustering, a main axis running along thighbone and tibia is determined. In the next step the centering and superposition operation is implemented. Profile analysis after the centering and superposition operation permits to create the membership function. Then, edges of a region of interest containing the PCL are found. The 3D visualization of the PCL structures is based on the location of these ligaments on the T1-weighted MRI knee images and is used in the computer aided diagnosis of the cruciate ligament. This method has been implemented in MatLab and converted to Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and tested on the clinical T1- and T2-weighted MRI knee images.