Ultrasound Color Doppler Image Segmentation and Feature Extraction in MCP and Wrist Region in Evaluation of Rheumatoid Arthritis.

The present study focuses on automatically to segment the blood flow pattern of color Doppler ultrasound in hand region of rheumatoid arthritis patients and to correlate the extracted the statistical features and color Doppler parameters with standard parameters. Thirty patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and their total of 300 joints of both the hands, i.e., 240 MCP and 60 wrists were examined in this study. Ultrasound color Doppler of both the hands of all the patients was obtained. Automated segmentation of color Doppler image was performed using color enhancement scaling based segmentation algorithm. The region of interest is fixed in the MCP joints and wrist of the hand. Features were extracted from the defined ROI of the segmented output image. The color fraction was measured using Mimics software. The standard parameters such as HAQ score, DAS 28 score, and ESR was obtained for all the patients. The color fraction tends to be increased in wrist and MCP3 joints which indicate the increased blood flow pattern and color Doppler activity as part of inflammation in hand joints of RA. The ESR correlated significantly with the feature extracted parameters such as mean, standard deviation and entropy in MCP3, MCP4 joint and the wrist region. The developed automated color image segmentation algorithm provides a quantitative analysis for diagnosis and assessment of RA. The correlation study between the color Doppler parameters with the standard parameters provides moral significance in quantitative analysis of RA in MCP3 joint and the wrist region.