Improving the Diagnosis of Ankle Injury in MRI: A Quantitative Analysis of Ankle Joint Effusion

Previous studies have shown that the volume of ankle effusion is an important diagnostic criterion for ankle injury. However, quantitative analysis methods for evaluating the severity of ankle injury are rarely discussed in recent studies. This study aimed to propose a quantitative analysis method to help evaluate ankle injury. An improved region growing algorithm combined with Canny edge detection was adopted for segmenting the candidate effusion regions from ankle magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Then, the blood vessels were extracted using the Hessian matrix, and errors caused by normal blood component were eliminated. Finally, the volume of ankle effusion was calculated by totalizing the number of voxels. The experiments were performed on ankle MRIs with different protocols. The calculated results were quite consistent (88%) with the manual segmentation of the radiologists. This study provided a new method for measuring the ankle joint effusion and helped establish a quantitative reference between ankle joint effusion and ankle injury for doctors and relevant researchers.