Fuzzy texture descriptors for early diagnosis of osteoarthritis

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a debilitating health condition affecting elderly population. Early diagnosis of the disease noninvasively will be very useful, and requires novel image analysis techniques to be developed for processing radiological and MRI scans of knee joints. In this paper, we propose novel micro texture based feature descriptors for modeling subtle variations in MRI T2 maps, so as to facilitate early detection of osteoarthritis. The experimental evaluation of the proposed micro texture descriptors on a publicly available OAI database show, that the proposed features allow a significant improvement in discriminating the textures for MRI T2 maps, corresponding to normal subjects as compared to the subjects with risk factors for developing osteoarthritis.