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Accurate segmentation of hip joint cartilage from magnetic resonance (MR) images offers opportunities for quantitative investigations of pathoanatomical conditions such as osteoarthritis. In this paper, we present a fully automatic scheme for the segmentation of the individual femoral and acetabular cartilage plates in the human hip joint from high-resolution 3D MR images. The developed scheme uses an improved optimal multi-object multi-surface graph search framework with an arc-weighted graph representation that incorporates prior morphological knowledge as a basis for segmentation of the individual femoral and acetabular cartilage plates despite weak or incomplete boundary interfaces. This automated scheme was validated against manual segmentations from 3D true fast imaging with steady-state precession (TrueFISP) MR examinations of the right hip joints in 52 asymptomatic volunteers. Compared …