Automated hexahedral meshing of knee cartilage structures – application to data from the osteoarthritis initiative

Abstract

We propose a fully automated methodology for hexahedral meshing of patient-specific structures of the human knee obtained from magnetic resonance images, i.e. femoral/tibial cartilages and menisci. We select eight patients from the Osteoarthritis Initiative and validate our methodology using MATLAB on a laptop computer. We obtain the patient-specific meshes in an average of three minutes, while faithfully representing the geometries with well-shaped elements. We hope to provide a fundamentally different means to test hypotheses on the mechanisms of disease progression by integrating our patient-specific FE meshes with data from individual patients. Download both our meshes and software at http://im.engr.uconn.edu/downloads.php.

Keywords:

• Cartilage
• meniscus
• knee joint
• osteoarthritis
• magnetic resonance imaging
• finite element analysis
• hexahedral mesh

Acknowledgements

We thank Phoebe Szarek for searching the OAI database and selecting patients for our validation study.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Mobility Grants from Networking Research on Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (BRV) and the National Science Foundation [CAREER 1653358] (DMP).