Transfer learning-assisted 3D deep learning models for knee osteoarthritis detection: Data from the osteoarthritis initiative

MRI deep learning models for assisted diagnosis of knee pathologies: a systematic review

OBJECTIVES

Despite showing encouraging outcomes, the precision of deep learning (DL) models using different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for diagnosis remains under investigation. This systematic review aims to summarise the status of DL MRI models developed for assisting the diagnosis of a variety of knee abnormalities.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Five databases were systematically searched, employing predefined terms such as 'Knee AND 3D AND MRI AND DL'. Selected inclusion criteria were used to screen publications by title, abstract, and full text. The synthesis of results was performed by two independent reviewers.

RESULTS

Fifty-four articles were included. The studies focused on anterior cruciate ligament injuries (n = 19, 36%), osteoarthritis (n = 9, 17%), meniscal injuries (n = 13, 24%), abnormal knee appearance (n = 11, 20%), and other (n = 2, 4%). The DL models in this review primarily used the following CNNs: ResNet (n = 11, 21%), VGG (n = 6, 11%), DenseNet (n = 4, 8%), and DarkNet (n = 3, 6%). DL models showed high-performance metrics compared to ground truth. DL models for the detection of a specific injury outperformed those by up to 4.5% for general abnormality detection.

CONCLUSION

Despite the varied study designs used among the reviewed articles, DL models showed promising outcomes in the assisted detection of selected knee pathologies by MRI. This review underscores the importance of validating these models with larger MRI datasets to close the existing gap between current DL model performance and clinical requirements.

KEY POINTS

Question What is the status of DL model availability for knee pathology detection in MRI and their clinical potential? Findings Pathology-specific DL models reported higher accuracy compared to DL models for the detection of general abnormalities of the knee. DL model performance was mainly influenced by the quantity and diversity of data available for model training. Clinical relevance These findings should encourage future developments to improve patient care, support personalised diagnosis and treatment, optimise costs, and advance artificial intelligence-based medical imaging practices.

Intelligent Manufacturing for Osteoarthritis Organoids

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent degenerative joint disease worldwide, imposing a substantial global disease burden. However, its pathogenesis remains incompletely understood, and effective treatment strategies are still lacking. Organoid technology, in which stem cells or progenitor cells self-organise into miniature tissue structures under three-dimensional (3D) culture conditions, provides a promising in vitro platform for simulating the pathological microenvironment of OA. This approach can be employed to investigate disease mechanisms, carry out high-throughput drug screening and facilitate personalised therapies. This review summarises joint structure, OA pathogenesis and pathological manifestations, thereby establishing the disease context for the application of organoid technology. It then examines the components of the arthrosis organoid system, specifically addressing cartilage, subchondral bone, synovium, skeletal muscle and ligament organoids. Furthermore, it details various strategies for constructing OA organoids, including considerations of cell selection, pathological classification and fabrication techniques. Notably, this review introduces the concept of intelligent manufacturing of OA organoids by incorporating emerging engineering technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) into the organoid fabrication process, thereby forming an innovative software and hardware cluster. Lastly, this review discusses the challenges currently facing intelligent OA organoid manufacturing and highlights future directions for this rapidly evolving field. By offering a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art methodologies and challenges, this review anticipates that intelligent, automated fabrication of OA organoids will expedite fundamental research, drug discovery and personalised translational applications in the orthopaedic field.

ShapeMed-Knee: A Dataset and Neural Shape Model Benchmark for Modeling 3D Femurs

Analyzing anatomic shapes of tissues and organs is pivotal for accurate disease diagnostics and clinical decision-making. One prominent disease that depends on anatomic shape analysis is osteoarthritis, which affects 30 million Americans. To advance osteoarthritis diagnostics and prognostics, we introduce ShapeMed-Knee, a 3D shape dataset with 9,376 high-resolution, medical-imaging-based 3D shapes of both femur bone and cartilage. Besides data, ShapeMed-Knee includes two benchmarks for assessing reconstruction accuracy and five clinical prediction tasks that assess the utility of learned shape representations. Leveraging ShapeMed-Knee, we develop and evaluate a novel hybrid explicit-implicit neural shape model which achieves up to 40% better reconstruction accuracy than a statistical shape model and two implicit neural shape models. Our hybrid models achieve state-of-the-art performance for preserving cartilage biomarkers (root mean squared error ≤ 0.05 vs. ≤ 0.07, 0.10, and 0.14). Our models are also the first to successfully predict localized structural features of osteoarthritis, outperforming shape models and convolutional neural networks applied to raw magnetic resonance images and segmentations (e.g., osteophyte size and localization 63% accuracy vs. 49-61%). The ShapeMed-Knee dataset provides medical evaluations to reconstruct multiple anatomic surfaces and embed meaningful disease-specific information. ShapeMed-Knee reduces barriers to applying 3D modeling in medicine, and our benchmarks highlight that advancements in 3D modeling can enhance the diagnosis and risk stratification for complex diseases. The dataset, code, and benchmarks are freely accessible.

RSDCNet: An efficient and lightweight deep learning model for benign and malignant pathology detection in breast cancer

Background

Breast cancer is a leading malignant tumor among women globally, with its pathological classification into benign or malignant directly influencing treatment strategies and prognosis. Traditional diagnostic methods, reliant on manual interpretation, are not only time-intensive and subjective but also susceptible to variability based on the pathologist's expertise and workload. Consequently, the development of an efficient, automated, and precise pathological detection method is crucial.

Methods

This study introduces RSDCNet, an enhanced lightweight neural network architecture designed for the automatic detection of benign and malignant breast cancer pathology. Utilizing the BreakHis dataset, which comprises 9109 microscopic images of breast tumors including various differentiation levels of benign and malignant samples, RSDCNet integrates depthwise separable convolution and SCSE modules. This integration aims to reduce model parameters while enhancing key feature extraction capabilities, thereby achieving both lightweight design and high efficiency.

Results

RSDCNet demonstrated superior performance across multiple evaluation metrics in the classification task. The model achieved an accuracy of 0.9903, a recall of 0.9897, an F1 score of 0.9888, and a precision of 0.9879, outperforming established deep learning models such as EfficientNet, RegNet, HRNet, and ViT. Notably, RSDCNet's parameter count stood at just 1,199,662, significantly lower than HRNet's 19,254,102 and ViT's 85,800,194, highlighting its enhanced resource efficiency.

Conclusion

The RSDCNet model presented in this study excels in the efficient and accurate classification of benign and malignant breast cancer pathology. Compared to traditional methods and other leading models, RSDCNet not only reduces computational resource consumption but also offers improved feature extraction and clinical interpretability. This advancement provides substantial technical support for the intelligent diagnosis of breast cancer, paving the way for more effective treatment planning and prognosis assessment.

Vision transformer-equipped Convolutional Neural Networks for automated Alzheimer's disease diagnosis using 3D MRI scans

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative ailment that is becoming increasingly common, making it a major worldwide health concern. Effective care depends on an early and correct diagnosis, but traditional diagnostic techniques are frequently constrained by subjectivity and expensive costs. This study proposes a novel Vision Transformer-equipped Convolutional Neural Networks (VECNN) that uses three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging to improve diagnosis accuracy. Utilizing the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, which comprised 2,248 3D MRI images and diverse patient demographics, the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 92.14%, a precision of 86.84%, a sensitivity of 93.27%, and a specificity of 89.95% in distinguishing between AD, healthy controls (HC), and moderate cognitive impairment (MCI). The findings suggest that VECNN can be a valuable tool in clinical settings, providing a non-invasive, cost-effective, and objective diagnostic technique. This research opens the door for future advancements in early diagnosis and personalized therapy for Alzheimer's Disease.

Deep learning to combat knee osteoarthritis and severity assessment by using CNN-based classification

BACKGROUND

In today's digital age, various diseases drastically reduce people's quality of life. Arthritis is one amongst the most common and debilitating maladies. Osteoarthritis affects several joints, including the hands, knees, spine, and hips. This study focuses on the medical disorder underlying Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) which severely impairs people's quality of life. KOA is characterised by restricted mobility, stiffness, and terrible pain and can be caused by a range of factors such as ageing, obesity, and traumas. This degenerative disorder leads to progressive wear and tear of the knee joint.

METHODS

To combat arthritis in the kneecap, this study employs a 12-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to reach deep learning capabilities. A collection of data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) is used to classify KOA. Through the use of medical image processing; the study ascertains whether an individual has this ailment. A sophisticated CNN architecture created especially for binary classification and KOA severity utilising deep learning algorithms is the main component of this work.

RESULTS

The cross-entropy loss function is an important component of the model's laborious design that classifies data into two groups. The remaining section uses the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grade to classify the disease's severity. In the binary classification, the proposed algorithm outperforms previous methods with an accuracy rate of 92.3%, and in the multiclassification, its accuracy rate is 78.4% which is superior to the previous findings.

CONCLUSION

Looking ahead, the research broadens the scope of this work by gathering information from various sources and using these methods on a wider range of datasets and situations. The potential for major advancements in the field of osteoarthritis detection and classification is highlighted by this forward-looking approach. Furthermore, this method reduces the intervention of medical practitioners and ultimately results in accurate diagnosis.

CLINICAL TRIAL NUMBER

Not applicable.

An approach to the dermatological classification of histopathological skin images using a hybridized CNN-DenseNet model

This research addresses the challenge of automating skin disease diagnosis using dermatoscopic images. The primary issue lies in accurately classifying pigmented skin lesions, which traditionally rely on manual assessment by dermatologists and are prone to subjectivity and time consumption. By integrating a hybrid CNN-DenseNet model, this study aimed to overcome the complexities of differentiating various skin diseases and automating the diagnostic process effectively. Our methodology involved rigorous data preprocessing, exploratory data analysis, normalization, and label encoding. Techniques such as model hybridization, batch normalization and data fitting were employed to optimize the model architecture and data fitting. Initial iterations of our convolutional neural network (CNN) model achieved an accuracy of 76.22% on the test data and 75.69% on the validation data. Recognizing the need for improvement, the model was hybridized with DenseNet architecture and ResNet architecture was implemented for feature extraction and then further trained on the HAM10000 and PAD-UFES-20 datasets. Overall, our efforts resulted in a hybrid model that demonstrated an impressive accuracy of 95.7% on the HAM10000 dataset and 91.07% on the PAD-UFES-20 dataset. In comparison to recently published works, our model stands out because of its potential to effectively diagnose skin diseases such as melanocytic nevi, melanoma, benign keratosis-like lesions, basal cell carcinoma, actinic keratoses, vascular lesions, and dermatofibroma, all of which rival the diagnostic accuracy of real-world clinical specialists but also offer customization potential for more nuanced clinical uses.