Vibroarthrography for early detection of knee osteoarthritis using normalized frequency features

Vibroarthrography is a radiation-free and inexpensive method of assessing the condition of knee cartilage damage during extension-flexion movements. Acoustic sensors were placed on the patella and medial tibial plateau (two accelerometers) as well as on the lateral tibial plateau (a piezoelectric disk) to measure the structure-borne noise in 59 asymptomatic knees and 40 knees with osteoarthritis. After semi-automatic segmentation of the acoustic signals, frequency features were generated for the extension as well as the flexion phase. We propose simple and robust features based on relative high-frequency components. The normalized nature of these frequency features makes them insusceptible to influences on the signal gain, such as attenuation by fat tissue and variance in acoustic coupling. We analyzed their ability to serve as classification features for detection of knee osteoarthritis, including the effect of normalization and the effect of combining frequency features of all three sensors. The features permitted a distinction between asymptomatic and non-healthy knees. Using machine learning with a linear support vector machine, a classification specificity of approximately 0.8 at a sensitivity of 0.75 could be achieved. This classification performance is comparable to existing diagnostic tests and hence qualifies vibroarthrography as an additional diagnostic tool. Graphical Abstract Acoustic frequency features were used to detect knee osteoarthritis at 80% specificity and 75% sensitivity.