Knee Osteoporosis Diagnosis Based on Deep Learning

Osteoporosis, a silent yet debilitating disease, presents a significant challenge due to its asymptomatic nature until fractures occur. Rapid bone loss outpaces regeneration, leading to pain, disability, and loss of independence. Early detection is pivotal for effective management and fracture risk reduction, yet current diagnostic methods are time-consuming. Despite its importance, research addressing early diagnosis remains limited. Deep learning, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has emerged as a potent tool in image analysis. This paper presents a novel approach utilizing transfer learning with CNNs for osteoporosis detection from X-ray images. The proposed approach not only achieves a high accuracy of osteoporosis diagnosis but also offers a revealed feature map that can guide medical professionals for osteoporosis diagnosis. The innovation lies in a dual strategy: (i) a model integrating transfer learning from CNN architectures such as AlexNet, VGG-16, ResNet-50, VGG-19, InceptionNet, XceptionNet, and a custom CNN, and (ii) a dataset collection augmentation mechanism to enhance learning accuracy. The study includes binary and multiclass classification of knee joint X-ray images into normal, osteopenia, and osteoporosis groups, utilizing a dataset of 1947 knee X-rays for training and testing. Performance comparisons against state-of-the-art models reveal the proposed VGG-19 model achieves the highest accuracy at 92.0% for multiclass and 97.5% for binary. These findings underscore the potential of deep learning with transfer learning in aiding early osteoporosis detection, thereby mitigating fracture risks.