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Abstract:
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Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an important imaging technique for quantifying the spatial location and magnitude/direction of longitudinal cartilage morphology changes in patients with osteoarthritis (OA). Although several analytical methods, such as subregion-based analysis, have been developed to refine and improve quantitative cartilage analyses, they can be suboptimal due to two major issues: the lack of spatial correspondence across subjects and time and the dynamic spatial heterogeneity of cartilage progression across subjects. The aim of this paper is to present a statistical method for longitudinal cartilage quantification in OA patients, while addressing these two issues. A Dynamic Spatial Random Effects Model (DSREM) is proposed to deal with the dynamic spatial heterogeneity of cartilage progression across both time and OA subjects. We use simulation studies and the OAI MRI dataset to evaluate the finite sample performance of DSREM in the quantification of longitudinal cartilage morphology changes.
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