Expanding from unilateral to bilateral: A robust deep learning-based approach for predicting radiographic osteoarthritis progression

Abstract

Objective: To develop and validate a deep learning (DL) model for predicting osteoarthritis (OA) progression based on bilateral knee joint views.

Methods: In this retrospective study, knee joints from bilateral posteroanterior knee radiographs of participants in the Osteoarthritis Initiative were analyzed. At baseline, participants were divided into testing set 1 and development set according to the different enrolled sites. The development set was further divided into a training set and a validation set in an 8:2 ratio for model development. At 48-month follow-up, eligible patients were formed testing set 2. The Bilateral Knee Neural Network (BikNet) was developed using bilateral views, with the knee to be predicted as the main view and the contralateral knee as the auxiliary view. DenseNet and ResNext were also trained and compared as the unilateral model. Two reader tests were conducted to evaluate the model's value in predicting incident OA.

Results: Totally 3583 participants were evaluated. The BikNet we proposed outperformed ResNext and DenseNet (all area under the curve [AUC] < 0.71, P < 0.001) with AUC values of 0.761 and 0.745 in testing sets 1 and 2, respectively. With assistance of the BikNet increased clinicians' sensitivity (from 28.1-63.2% to 42.1-68.4%) and specificity (from 57.4-83.4% to 64.1-87.5%) of incident OA prediction and improved inter-observer reliability.

Conclusion: The DL model, constructed based on bilateral knee views, holds promise for enhancing the assessment of OA and demonstrates greater robustness during subsequent follow-up evaluations as compared with unilateral models. BikNet represents a potential tool or imaging biomarker for predicting OA progression.

Keywords: Cross attention; Deep learning; Osteoarthritis; Progression; X-ray.