Tracking patellar osteophytes to detect osteoarthritis

ABSTRACT

The presence of bone spurs (osteophytes) in knee-joints provides an indication of the onset of osteoarthritis and related deformities in patients. The shape of the patella bone at knee-joint undergoes various changes with the advancement of the disease, which may be discerned accurately from X-ray images. The main objective of this work is to identify the presence of osteophytes in the patella bone of knee-joint. Geometric features are extracted that highlight protrusions present on the bone surface from lateral views of X-ray images. The patella region is extracted from the image by performing texture-based segmentation followed by adaptive thresholding. Characteristic features are extracted from the segmented patella using derived novel measures based on differential chain code of the contour and convex hull. Linear support vector machine is used to classify diseased test-cases from healthy ones using the extracted features. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of the proposed image-analysis tool for detecting osteoarthritis with average accuracy of 93.75%.

KEYWORDS:

• Osteoarthritis
• lateral X-ray
• linear SVM

Acknowledgements

The images are provided by the Varma Hospitals, Bhimavaram, India. We are thankful to them for providing such a good annotated real-life X-ray images. We also want to thank Sudarshan polyclinic diagnostic centre, Kolkata for providing useful X-ray images. Some of these images are taken from web resources mainly from sites such as Radiopedia.org, Startradiology.org and boneandspine.com.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).