A preliminary examination of the diagnostic value of deep learning in hip osteoarthritis

PLoS One. 2017 Jun 2;12(6):e0178992. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0178992. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Hip Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common disease among the middle-aged and elderly people. Conventionally, hip OA is diagnosed by manually assessing X-ray images. This study took the hip joint as the object of observation and explored the diagnostic value of deep learning in hip osteoarthritis. A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained and tested on 420 hip X-ray images to automatically diagnose hip OA. This CNN model achieved a balance of high sensitivity of 95.0% and high specificity of 90.7%, as well as an accuracy of 92.8% compared to the chief physicians. The CNN model performance is comparable to an attending physician with 10 years of experience. The results of this study indicate that deep learning has promising potential in the field of intelligent medical image diagnosis practice.

MeSH terms

  • Hip Joint / diagnostic imaging*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Osteoarthritis, Hip / diagnostic imaging*
  • Radiography / methods*

Grants and funding

Infervision provided support in the form of salaries for authors Rongguo Zhang, Yufeng Deng, and Kuan Chen, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.