Texture Analysis in MRI of the Knee for an Early Diagnosis of Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis is one of the most disabling diseases in developed countries. Its etiology is not firmly established, and the diagnosis is made by observing radiographs, assigning a degree of severity based on the information displayed. For this reason, the diagnosis is usually late and determined by the subjectivity of the doctor, which implies a restriction of the treatment. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has allowed us to see in greater detail the alterations produced in soft joint structures. In this work, biomarkers for an early diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis have been developed by means of textures analysis on MRI. For this purpose, 50 subjects underwent T1-weighted MR image acquisitions: 25 controls and 25 diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis between grades I and III. Six regions were segmented on these images, corresponding to the femorotibial cartilage, femoral condyles, and tibial plateau. 43 textures were extracted for each region of interest (ROI) employing 5 statistical methods and 5 different predictive models were trained and compared. In addition, a study of the thickness of the cartilage was carried out to make a comparison with the texture analysis. The best result has been obtained using a K-nearest neighbor model with the combination of 33 textures (maximum value of AUC = 0.7684). Furthermore, in the analysis of the cartilage thickness, no statistically significant differences were found. Finally, it is concluded that the texture analysis has great potential for the diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis. Clinical Relevance - The current study establishes a methodology for an early diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis by means of MRI-based texture analysis, in a fast and objective manner.