Time-Frequency Analysis and Parameterisation of Knee Sounds for Non-Invasive Detection of Osteoarthritis

Objective:
In this work the potential of non-invasive detection of knee osteoarthritis is investigated using the sounds generated by the knee joint during walking.
Methods:
The information contained in the time-frequency domain of these signals and its compressed representations is exploited and their discriminant properties are studied. Their efficacy for the task of normal vs abnormal signal classification is evaluated using a comprehensive experimental framework. Based on this, the impact of the feature extraction parameters on the classification performance is investigated using Classification and Regression Trees, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Support Vector Machine classifiers.
Results:
It is shown that classification is successful with an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve of 0.92.
Conclusion:
The analysis indicates improvements in classification performance when using non-uniform frequency scaling and identifies specific frequency bands that contain discriminative features.
Significance:
Contrary to other studies that focus on sit-to-stand movements and knee flexion/extension, this study used knee sounds obtained during walking. The analysis of such signals leads to non-invasive detection of knee osteoarthritis with high accuracy and could potentially extend the range of available tools for the assessment of the disease as a more practical and cost effective method without requiring clinical setups.