Radiomics analysis using MR imaging of subchondral bone for identification of knee osteoarthritis

BACKGROUND: To develop a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based radiomics predictive model for the identification of knee osteoarthritis (OA), based on the tibial and femoral subchondral bone, and compare with the trabecular structural parameter-based model. METHODS: Eighty-eight consecutive knees were scanned with 3T MRI and scored using MRI osteoarthritis Knee Scores (MOAKS), in which 56 knees were diagnosed to have OA. The modality of sagittal three-dimensional balanced fast-field echo sequence (3D BFFE) was used to image the subchondral bone. Four trabecular structural parameters (bone volume fraction [BV/TV], trabecular thickness [Tb.Th], trabecular separation [Tb.Sp], and trabecular number) and 93 radiomics features were extracted from four regions of the lateral and medial aspects of the femur condyle and tibial plateau. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) was used for feature selection. Machine learning-based support vector machine models were constructed to identify knee OA. The performance of the models was assessed by area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operator characteristic (ROC). The correlation between radiomics features and trabecular structural parameters was analyzed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient. RESULTS: Our radiomics-based classification model achieved the AUC score of 0.961 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.912–1.000) when distinguishing between normal and knee OA, which was higher than that of the trabecular parameter-based model (AUC, 0.873; 95% CI, 0.788–0.957). The first-order, texture, and Laplacian of Gaussian-based radiomics features correlated positively with Tb.Th and BV/TV, but negatively with Tb.Sp (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggested that our MRI-based radiomics models can be used as biomarkers for the classification of OA and are superior to the conventional structural parameter-based model. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13018-022-03314-y.