Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common musculoskeletal condition typically diagnosed from radiographic assessment after clinical examination. However, a visual evaluation made by a practitioner suffers from subjectivity and is highly dependent on the experience. Computer-aided diagnostics (CAD) could improve the objectivity of knee radiographic examination. The first essential step of knee OA CAD is to automatically localize the joint area. However, according to the literature this task itself remains challenging. The aim of this study was to develop novel and computationally efficient method to tackle the issue. Here, three different datasets of knee radiographs were used (n = 473/93/77) to validate the overall performance of the method. Our pipeline consists of two parts: anatomically-based joint area proposal and their evaluation using Histogram of Oriented Gradients and the pre-trained Support Vector Machine classifier scores. The obtained results for the used datasets show the mean intersection over the union equal to: 0.84, 0.79 and 0.78. Using a high-end computer, the method allows to automatically annotate conventional knee radiographs within 14-16ms and high resolution ones within 170ms. Our results demonstrate that the developed method is suitable for large-scale analyses.

本研究旨在开发一种新的计算方法，通过基于解剖学的联合区提案和方向梯度直方图的评估及其预先训练的支持向量机分类器的得分来自动定位关节区域，提高膝关节放射成像的客观性，结果表明该方法适用于大规模分析。

一种新的自动定位膝关节区域的方法