Abstract
Purpose
To develop an image analysis method that can automatically find correlations between a set of plain radiographs and continuous clinical or physiological indicators.
Methods
Knee X-rays taken from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging are used in this study. The computer analysis method is based on the WND-CHARM image feature set filtered by using the Pearson correlation of each feature with the continuous variable, and the estimated value is determined by a weighted nearest neighbor interpolation.
Results
Experimental results using 300 radiographs show that the proposed method can correlate knee X-rays with physiological indicators such as sex, age, height, weight, and BMI. For instance, the Pearson correlation between the X-ray images and the height and weight were 0.59 and 0.62, respectively.
Conclusions
Using computer analysis, X-ray images can be correlated to continuous physiological variables that might not have a direct and straightforward link to the visual content of the radiograph. This approach of radiology image analysis can be used in population studies for detecting biomarkers and also in genome-wide association studies for studying the link between genes and anatomy.
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Shamir, L. A computer analysis method for correlating knee X-rays with continuous indicators. Int J CARS 6, 699–704 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-011-0550-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-011-0550-z