A fully automatic knee subregion segmentation network based on tissue segmentation and anatomical geometry

Aiming at the difficulty of knee MRI bone and cartilage subregion segmentation caused by numerous subregions and unclear subregion boundary, a fully automatic knee subregion segmentation network based on tissue segmentation and anatomical geometry is proposed. Specifically, first, we use a transformer-based multilevel region and edge aggregation network to achieve precise segmentation of bone and cartilage tissue edges in knee MRI. Then, we designed a fibula detection module, which determines the medial and lateral of the knee by detecting the position of the fibula. Afterwards, a subregion segmentation module based on boundary information was designed, which divides bone and cartilage tissues into subregions by detecting the boundaries. In addition, in order to provide data support for the proposed model, fibula classification dataset and knee MRI bone and cartilage subregion dataset were established respectively. Testing on the fibula classification dataset we established, the proposed method achieved a detection accuracy of 1.000 in detecting the medial and lateral of the knee. On the knee MRI bone and cartilage subregion dataset we established, the proposed method attained an average dice score of 0.953 for bone subregions and 0.831 for cartilage subregions, which verifies the correctness of the proposed method.