MRI-Based Visualisation and Quantification of Rheumatoid and Psoriatic Arthritis of the Knee

The overall goal of this project is to develop an application to quantify the level of synovial inflammation within patients suffering from Rheumatoid or Psoriatic Arthritis, based on automated synoviumsegmentation and 3D visualisation of MRI scan data. This paper discusses the direction we have taken during the development of the visualization components of the application, and an overview of the project in general. Current software methods of quantifying enhancement of inflamed synovial tissue by gadolinium contrast have several limitations. The clinician is required to classify individual regions of interest on a slice by slice basis which is a time-consuming process and suffers from user subjectivity. We propose a method of automating this process by reconstructing the slice information and performing quantification in three dimensions.