System and method for automatically estimating knee cartilage thickness for femoral, tibial, patellar, and meniscal cartilages

A system for estimating knee cartilage thickness, comprising:

• a memory encoding processor-executable routines;
• and
• a processor configured to access the memory and to execute the processor-executable routines, wherein the routines, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to:
• pre-process a segmented image of region of interests (ROIs) of a knee of a subject to separate the ROIs into individual ROI volumes, wherein the ROI volumes comprise at least one cartilage region;
• perform surface separation between a respective subchondral surface and a respective articular surface for each ROI volume to extract a respective separate subchondral surface and a respective separate articular surface for each ROI volume;
• and
• estimate cartilage thickness values for the at least one cartilage region utilizing a nearest neighbor algorithm based on the respective separate subchondral surface and the respective separate articular surface for each ROI volume.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium, the computer-readable medium comprising processor-executable code that when executed by a processor, causes the processor to:

• pre-process a segmented image of region of interests (ROIs) of a knee of a subject to separate the ROIs into individual ROI volumes, wherein the ROI volumes comprise at least one cartilage region;
• perform surface separation between a respective subchondral surface and a respective articular surface for each ROI volume to extract a respective separate subchondral surface and a respective separate articular surface for each ROI volume;
• and
• estimate cartilage thickness values for the at least one cartilage region utilizing a nearest neighbor algorithm based on the respective separate subchondral surface and the respective separate articular surface for each ROI volume, wherein pre-processing the segmented image, performing surface separation, and estimating cartilage thickness values all occur without utilizing deep-learning.