Osteoarthritis classification using self organizing map based on gabor kernel and contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization

Localization is the first step in osteoarthritis (OA) classification. Manual classification, however, is time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. The proposed system is designed as decision support system for medical doctors to classify the severity of knee OA. A method has been proposed here to localize a joint space area for OA and then classify it in 4 steps to classify OA into KL-Grade 0, KL-Grade 1, KL-Grade 2, KL-Grade 3 and KL-Grade 4, which are preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. In this proposed system, right and left knee detection was performed by employing the Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and the template matching. The Gabor kernel, row sum graph and moment methods were used to localize the junction space area of knee. CLAHE is used for preprocessing step, i.e.to normalize the varied intensities. The segmentation process was conducted using the Gabor kernel, template matching, row sum graph and gray level center of mass method. Here GLCM (contrast, correlation, energy, and homogeinity) features were employed as training data. Overall, 50 data were evaluated for training and 258 data for testing. Experimental results showed the best performance by using gabor kernel with parameters α=8, θ=0, Ψ=[0 π/2], γ=0,8, N=4 and with number of iterations being 5000, momentum value 0.5 and α₀=0.6 for the classification process. The run gave classification accuracy rate of 93.8% for KL-Grade 0, 70% for KL-Grade 1, 4% for KL-Grade 2, 10% for KL-Grade 3 and 88.9% for KL-Grade 4.