Assessing Radiographic Knee Osteoarthritis: An Online Training Tutorial for the Kellgren-Lawrence Grading Scale

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative form of arthritis commonly diagnosed in older adults. It presents clinically with patient complaints of pain and impaired function, which are thought to result from cartilage degeneration and other skeletal changes. These changes can by examined radiographically and quantified using the semiquantitative grading scale known as the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) scale. Currently, no standard training exists for KL grading, which may explain the unsatisfactory reliability of this tool in OA research. Therefore, the objective of this project was to develop a training tutorial for KL grading of knee OA to educate assessors on possible areas of inconsistency in grading.

The tutorial was developed in an e-learning authoring tool, Articulate Presenter. The content focuses on the poor reliability of KL grading, normal anatomy of a knee radiograph, and multiple examples of bony changes within the knee and their relation to different grades of the KL scale. The tutorial was presented to a group of health sciences graduate students at the University of Colorado Denver.

Students were able to complete the training and an associated assessment in under an hour and reported improved confidence with assessing radiographic knee OA. Furthermore, they demonstrated favorable inter- and intrarater reliability scores in applying KL grading.

To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to standardize training in KL grading for knee OA and to examine the effects of this training on reliability.