GraphConvNet: A Dual Network Utilizing Local Features Coupled with Structural Information for Predicting Knee Osteoarthritis

Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a common joint disease that severely affects the normal lives of patients. In clinical practice, the severity of KOA is commonly evaluated by observing radiographs of the knee joint However, this approach heavily relies on a doctor’s clinical experience and exhibits a certain degree of subjectivity. In previous studies, various advanced deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been used to diagnose KOA. As known, CNN models often focus on learning the local detailed features for decision-making and lack attention to global structural information. In this study, we propose a dual network called GraphConvNet that integrates a visual graph neural network with a deep CNN to enhance representation learning by leveraging both local detailed features and global structural information. Our proposed method was evaluated using an Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) dataset and achieved an overall accuracy, recall, precision, and mean absolute error (MAE) of 75.24%, 77.75%, 74.33% and 0.283, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the performance and achieves state-of-the-art performance. All codes are available at https://github.com/ddw2AIGROUP2CQUPT/GraphConvNet.