Identification of the most important features of knee osteoarthritis structural progressors using machine learning methods.

The aim was to identify the most important features of structural knee osteoarthritis (OA) progressors and classification using machine learning methods. Participants, features and outcomes were from the Osteoarthritis Initiative. Features were from baseline (1107), including articular knee tissues (135) assessed by quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). OA progressors were ascertained by four outcomes: cartilage volume loss in medial plateau at 48 and 96 months (Prop_CV_48M, 96M), Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grade ⩾ 2 and medial joint space narrowing (JSN) ⩾ 1 at 48 months. Six feature selection models were used to identify the common features in each outcome. Six classification methods were applied to measure the accuracy of the selected features in classifying the subjects into progressors and non-progressors. Classification of the best features was done using an automatic machine learning interface and the area under the curve (AUC). To prioritize the top five features, sparse partial least square (sPLS) method was used. For the classification of the best common features in each outcome, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) achieved the highest AUC in Prop_CV_96M, KL and JSN (0.80, 0.88, 0.95), and Gradient Boosting Machine for Prop_CV_48M (0.70). sPLS showed the baseline top five features to predict knee OA progressors are the joint space width, mean cartilage thickness of the medial tibial plateau and sub-regions and JSN. In this comprehensive study using a large number of features (

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© The Author(s), 2020.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Conflict of interest statement: J-PP and JM-P are shareholders in ArthroLab Inc. and François Abram is an employee of ArthroLab Inc. The other authors have no conflicts of interest for this study.