# Give me a knee radiograph, I will tell you where the knee joint area is: a deep convolutional neural network adventure

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05382 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05382/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Automatic Knee Osteoarthritis Diagnosis from Plain Radiographs: A Deep Learning-Based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10589/) (2017)
- [Quantifying Radiographic Knee Osteoarthritis Severity using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02469/) (2016)
- [Automatic Detection of Knee Joints and Quantification of Knee Osteoarthritis Severity using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09856/) (2017)
- [Assessing Knee OA Severity with CNN attention-based end-to-end architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08856/) (2019)
- [A novel method for automatic localization of joint area on knee plain radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08991/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [How many radiographs are needed to re-train a deep learning system for object detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08734/) (2022)
- [Learning Unbiased Image Segmentation: A Case Study with Plain Knee Radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04356/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knee pain is undoubtedly the most common musculoskeletal symptom that impairs quality of life, confines mobility and functionality across all ages. Knee pain is clinically evaluated by routine radiographs, where the widespread adoption of radiographic images and their availability at low cost, make them the principle component in the assessment of knee pain and knee pathologies, such as arthritis, trauma, and sport injuries. However, interpretation of the knee radiographs is still highly subjective, and overlapping structures within the radiographs and the large volume of images needing to be analyzed on a daily basis, make interpretation challenging for both naive and experienced practitioners. There is thus a need to implement an artificial intelligence strategy to objectively and automatically interpret knee radiographs, facilitating triage of abnormal radiographs in a timely fashion. The current work proposes an accurate and effective pipeline for autonomous detection, localization, and classification of knee joint area in plain radiographs combining the You Only Look Once (YOLO v3) deep convolutional neural network with a large and fully-annotated knee radiographs dataset. The present work is expected to stimulate more interest from the deep learning computer vision community to this pragmatic and clinical application.