  Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common musculoskeletal disease without a
cure, and current treatment options are limited to symptomatic relief.
Prediction of OA progression is a very challenging and timely issue, and it
could, if resolved, accelerate the disease modifying drug development and
ultimately help to prevent millions of total joint replacement surgeries
performed annually. Here, we present a multi-modal machine learning-based OA
progression prediction model that utilizes raw radiographic data, clinical
examination results and previous medical history of the patient. We validated
this approach on an independent test set of 3,918 knee images from 2,129
subjects. Our method yielded area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.79 (0.78-0.81)
and Average Precision (AP) of 0.68 (0.66-0.70). In contrast, a reference
approach, based on logistic regression, yielded AUC of 0.75 (0.74-0.77) and AP
of 0.62 (0.60-0.64). The proposed method could significantly improve the
subject selection process for OA drug-development trials and help the
development of personalized therapeutic plans.
