Comparison and Integration of Erosion Evaluation Methods for Rheumatic Degenerative Diseases

Abstract

Monitoring the development of degenerative rheumatic diseases is at the core of an efficient medical evaluation of the patient. Acquiring information on the pathology progression, indeed, helps to personalize the therapy in order to slow the pathology degeneration. Follow-up exams allow medical doctors to evaluate the situation of the patient over time. Through medical imaging scans, these exams help to identify erosion processes, which are typical indicators of a rheumatic illness. The paper presents a comparison between different methods aiming to identify erosion sites in follow-up exams. In particular, geometricbased and texture-based approaches are compared in terms of extracted information and achieved results. Finally, these two approaches are integrated in order to achieve a more complete analysis of the input anatomical district and of the underlying pathology.