A novel deep learning approach for automated grading of knee osteoarthritis severity

Knee Osteoarthritis (OA) is a prevalent musculoskeletal disorder that affects the knee joint that causes pain, stiffness, and reduced mobility. It is also known as "Degenerative Joint Disease" and is caused by the degeneration of cartilage in the knee joint, leading to bone-on-bone contact and further damage. Knee OA is prevalent in the population, affecting around 22% to 39% of people in India, and there is currently no treatment available that can halt the progression of the disease. Therefore, early diagnosis and management of symptoms are essential to reduce its impact on an individual’s quality of life. To address this issue, have introduced a framework that leverages ConvNeXt architecture, a modernization of ResNets (ResNet-50) architecture towards Hierarchical Transformers (Swin Transformers), to provide accurate identification and classification of knee osteoarthritis. The classification of knee osteoarthritis was done using the Kellgren and Lawrence (KL) graded X-ray images. These images of the damaged knees are preprocessed and augmented, creating a scaled, enhanced, and varied version of the features, thus making the data fitter and more significant for classification. The performance estimation of the proposed strategy is conducted on the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI), a research project focused on knee osteoarthritis that works in partnership with NIH and other private industries to develop a public domain dataset that can facilitate research and evaluation. It involves training the prepared data using various hyper-tuned versions of ConvNeXt. The different fine-tuned results of the ConvNeXt models on each KL Grade are evaluated against the other state-of-the-art models and vision transformers. The comparative assessment of widely used performance measures shows that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional models by generating the highest score for all the KL grades. Lastly, an approach is employed to statistically confirm the validity of the research outcomes. The statistical scores show that the proposed method has achieved superior performance than all existing grading techniques.