  The purposes of this study were to investigate: 1) the effect of placement of
region-of-interest (ROI) for texture analysis of subchondral bone in knee
radiographs, and 2) the ability of several texture descriptors to distinguish
between the knees with and without radiographic osteoarthritis (OA). Bilateral
posterior-anterior knee radiographs were analyzed from the baseline of OAI and
MOST datasets. A fully automatic method to locate the most informative region
from subchondral bone using adaptive segmentation was developed. We used an
oversegmentation strategy for partitioning knee images into the compact regions
that follow natural texture boundaries. LBP, Fractal Dimension (FD), Haralick
features, Shannon entropy, and HOG methods were computed within the standard
ROI and within the proposed adaptive ROIs. Subsequently, we built logistic
regression models to identify and compare the performances of each texture
descriptor and each ROI placement method using 5-fold cross validation setting.
Importantly, we also investigated the generalizability of our approach by
training the models on OAI and testing them on MOST dataset.We used area under
the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) and average precision
(AP) obtained from the precision-recall (PR) curve to compare the results. We
found that the adaptive ROI improves the classification performance (OA vs.
non-OA) over the commonly used standard ROI (up to 9% percent increase in AUC).
We also observed that, from all texture parameters, LBP yielded the best
performance in all settings with the best AUC of 0.840 [0.825, 0.852] and
associated AP of 0.804 [0.786, 0.820]. Compared to the current state-of-the-art
approaches, our results suggest that the proposed adaptive ROI approach in
texture analysis of subchondral bone can increase the diagnostic performance
for detecting the presence of radiographic OA.
