Quantifying Radiographic Knee Osteoarthritis Severity using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks [article]

Joseph Antony, Kevin McGuinness, Noel E O Connor, Kieran Moran
2016 arXiv   pre-print
This paper proposes a new approach to automatically quantify the severity of knee osteoarthritis (OA) from radiographs using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Clinically, knee OA severity is assessed using Kellgren \& Lawrence (KL) grades, a five point scale. Previous work on automatically predicting KL grades from radiograph images were based on training shallow classifiers using a variety of hand engineered features. We demonstrate that classification accuracy can be significantly
more » ... oved using deep convolutional neural network models pre-trained on ImageNet and fine-tuned on knee OA images. Furthermore, we argue that it is more appropriate to assess the accuracy of automatic knee OA severity predictions using a continuous distance-based evaluation metric like mean squared error than it is to use classification accuracy. This leads to the formulation of the prediction of KL grades as a regression problem and further improves accuracy. Results on a dataset of X-ray images and KL grades from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) show a sizable improvement over the current state-of-the-art.
arXiv:1609.02469v1 fatcat:54umrxojhnhjpppeecc223vxqq