Abstract:
Objective: Osteoarthritis is the most common type of knee arthritis that can be affected by excessive and compressive loads and can affect one or more compartments of the...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Objective: Osteoarthritis is the most common type of knee arthritis that can be affected by excessive and compressive loads and can affect one or more compartments of the knee: medial, lateral, and patellofemoral. The medial compartment tends to be the most vulnerable to injuries and research suggests that a better understanding of the medial to lateral load distribution conditions could provide insights to the quantitative usage of knee compartments in activities of daily life. Methods: Prior to study in an osteoarthritic clinical population which may present with various complicating anatomical and physiological changes, we investigate knee acoustical emissions of able-bodied individuals during a varying width squat exercise which simulates loading asymmetries that would typically be seen in this clinical population. To that end, we present a novel method to quantify the directional bias of asymmetry between the medial and lateral compartment knee joint load in healthy individuals by recording knee acoustical emissions and analyzing them using a deep neural network in a subject independent model. We placed four miniature contact microphones on the medial and lateral sides of the patella on both the left and right leg. We compared the handcrafted audio features with the automated features extracted from the convolutional autoencoder which is an unsupervised model that learns the comprehensive representation of the input to determine whether these automated features can better represent the signal's characteristic in regard to the structural asymmetry of the knee joint. The input to the convolutional auto encoder (CAE) is a time-frequency representation and different types of these images such as spectrogram and scalogram are compared. We alsocompared the multi-sensor fusion approach with the performance of a single sensor to determine the robustness of using multiple sensors. Results: Using a representation learning based approach, we developed a subject independen...
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering ( Volume: 69, Issue: 4, April 2022)