Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) diagnosis from radiographs remains challenging due to the subtle morphological details that standard deep learning models struggle to capture effectively. We propose a novel multimodal framework that combines anatomical structure with radiographic features by integrating a morphological graph representation - derived from Segment Anything Model (SAM) segmentations - with a vision encoder. Our approach enforces alignment between geometry-informed graph embeddings and radiographic features through mutual information maximization, significantly improving KOA classification accuracy. By constructing graphs from anatomical features, we introduce explicit morphological priors that mirror clinical assessment criteria, enriching the feature space and enhancing the model's inductive bias. Experiments on the Osteoarthritis Initiative dataset demonstrate that our approach surpasses single-modality baselines by up to 10\% in accuracy (reaching nearly 80\%), while outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods by 8\% in accuracy and 11\% in F1 score. These results underscore the critical importance of incorporating anatomical structure into radiographic analysis for accurate KOA severity grading.

Dysplasia is a recognised risk factor for osteoarthritis (OA) of the hip, early diagnosis of dysplasia is important to provide opportunities for surgical interventions aimed at reducing the risk of hip OA. We have developed a pipeline for semi-automated classification of dysplasia using volumetric CT scans of patients' hips and a minimal set of clinically annotated landmarks, combining the framework of the Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model with diffeomorphism to create a statistical shape model, which we termed the Gaussian Process Diffeomorphic Statistical Shape Model (GPDSSM). We used 192 CT scans, 100 for model training and 92 for testing. The GPDSSM effectively distinguishes dysplastic samples from controls while also highlighting regions of the underlying surface that show dysplastic variations. As well as improving classification accuracy compared to angle-based methods (AUC 96.2% vs 91.2%), the GPDSSM can save time for clinicians by removing the need to manually measure angles and interpreting 2D scans for possible markers of dysplasia.

Large-scale pretraining has transformed modeling of language and other data types, but its potential remains underexplored in healthcare with structured electronic health records (EHRs). We present a novel generative pretraining strategy for sequential EHR data using next-visit event prediction. Our model learns to autoregressively generate various tokenized clinical events for the next visit based on patient history and inherently handles the joint prediction of heterogeneous data types. Additionally, we introduce regularization on predicting repeated events and highlight a key pitfall in EHR-based foundation model evaluations: repeated event tokens can inflate performance metrics when new onsets are not distinguished from subsequent occurrences. Our model is evaluated via zero-shot prediction for forecasting dementia and knee osteoarthritis incidence within 2 and 5 years, and the model performance rivals a fully fine-tuned masked pretrained Transformer baseline, demonstrating that our approach captures complex clinical dependencies without requiring costly task-specific fine-tuning.

Medical imaging plays a crucial role in assessing knee osteoarthritis (OA) risk by enabling early detection and disease monitoring. Recent machine learning methods have improved risk estimation (i.e., predicting the likelihood of disease progression) and predictive modelling (i.e., the forecasting of future outcomes based on current data) using medical images, but clinical adoption remains limited due to their lack of interpretability. Existing approaches that generate future images for risk estimation are complex and impractical. Additionally, previous methods fail to localize anatomical knee landmarks, limiting interpretability. We address these gaps with a new interpretable machine learning method to estimate the risk of knee OA progression via multi-task predictive modelling that classifies future knee OA severity and predicts anatomical knee landmarks from efficiently generated high-quality future images. Such image generation is achieved by leveraging a diffusion model in a class-conditioned latent space to forecast disease progression, offering a visual representation of how particular health conditions may evolve. Applied to the Osteoarthritis Initiative dataset, our approach improves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 2\%, achieving an AUC of 0.71 in predicting knee OA progression while offering ~9% faster inference time.

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a universal chronic musculoskeletal disorders worldwide, making early diagnosis crucial. Currently, the Kellgren and Lawrence (KL) grading system is widely used to assess KOA severity. However, its high inter-observer variability and subjectivity hinder diagnostic consistency. To address these limitations, automated diagnostic techniques using deep learning have been actively explored in recent years. In this study, we propose a CLIP-based framework (CLIP-KOA) to enhance the consistency and reliability of KOA grade prediction. To achieve this, we introduce a learning approach that integrates image and text information and incorporate Symmetry Loss and Consistency Loss to ensure prediction consistency between the original and flipped images. CLIP-KOA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 71.86\% on KOA severity prediction task, and ablation studies show that CLIP-KOA has 2.36\% improvement in accuracy over the standard CLIP model due to our contribution. This study shows a novel direction for data-driven medical prediction not only to improve reliability of fine-grained diagnosis and but also to explore multimodal methods for medical image analysis. Our code is available at https://github.com/anonymized-link.

Recruiting patients to participate in clinical trials can be challenging and time-consuming. Usually, participation in a clinical trial is initiated by a healthcare professional and proposed to the patient. Promoting clinical trials directly to patients via online recruitment might help to reach them more efficiently. In this study, we address the case where a patient is initiating their own recruitment process and wants to determine whether they are eligible for a given clinical trial, using their own language to describe their medical profile. To study whether this creates difficulties in the patient trial matching process, we design a new dataset and task, Natural Language Inference for Patient Recruitment (NLI4PR), in which patient language profiles must be matched to clinical trials. We create it by adapting the TREC 2022 Clinical Trial Track dataset, which provides patients' medical profiles, and rephrasing them manually using patient language. We also use the associated clinical trial reports where the patients are either eligible or excluded. We prompt several open-source Large Language Models on our task and achieve from 56.5 to 71.8 of F1 score using patient language, against 64.7 to 73.1 for the same task using medical language. When using patient language, we observe only a small loss in performance for the best model, suggesting that having the patient as a starting point could be adopted to help recruit patients for clinical trials. The corpus and code bases are all freely available on our Github and HuggingFace repositories.

This study forms the basis of a digital twin system of the knee joint, using advanced quantitative MRI (qMRI) and machine learning to advance precision health in osteoarthritis (OA) management and knee replacement (KR) prediction. We combined deep learning-based segmentation of knee joint structures with dimensionality reduction to create an embedded feature space of imaging biomarkers. Through cross-sectional cohort analysis and statistical modeling, we identified specific biomarkers, including variations in cartilage thickness and medial meniscus shape, that are significantly associated with OA incidence and KR outcomes. Integrating these findings into a comprehensive framework represents a considerable step toward personalized knee-joint digital twins, which could enhance therapeutic strategies and inform clinical decision-making in rheumatological care. This versatile and reliable infrastructure has the potential to be extended to broader clinical applications in precision health.

The Emory Knee Radiograph (MRKR) dataset is a large, demographically diverse collection of 503,261 knee radiographs from 83,011 patients, 40% of which are African American. This dataset provides imaging data in DICOM format along with detailed clinical information, including patient-reported pain scores, diagnostic codes, and procedural codes, which are not commonly available in similar datasets. The MRKR dataset also features imaging metadata such as image laterality, view type, and presence of hardware, enhancing its value for research and model development. MRKR addresses significant gaps in existing datasets by offering a more representative sample for studying osteoarthritis and related outcomes, particularly among minority populations, thereby providing a valuable resource for clinicians and researchers.

Diagnosing knee osteoarthritis (OA) early is crucial for managing symptoms and preventing further joint damage, ultimately improving patient outcomes and quality of life. In this paper, a bioimpedance-based diagnostic tool that combines precise hardware and deep learning for effective non-invasive diagnosis is proposed. system features a relay-based circuit and strategically placed electrodes to capture comprehensive bioimpedance data. The data is processed by a neural network model, which has been optimized using convolutional layers, dropout regularization, and the Adam optimizer. This approach achieves a 98% test accuracy, making it a promising tool for detecting knee osteoarthritis musculoskeletal disorders.

Knee osteoarthritis(KO) is a degenerative joint disease that can cause severe pain and impairment. With increased prevalence, precise diagnosis by medical imaging analytics is crucial for appropriate illness management. This research investigates a comparative analysis between traditional machine learning techniques and new deep learning models for diagnosing KO severity from X-ray pictures. This study does not introduce new architectural innovations but rather illuminates the robust applicability and comparative effectiveness of pre-existing ViT models in a medical imaging context, specifically for KO severity diagnosis. The insights garnered from this comparative analysis advocate for the integration of advanced ViT models in clinical diagnostic workflows, potentially revolutionizing the precision and reliability of KO assessments. This study does not introduce new architectural innovations but rather illuminates the robust applicability and comparative effectiveness of pre-existing ViT models in a medical imaging context, specifically for KO severity diagnosis. The insights garnered from this comparative analysis advocate for the integration of advanced ViT models in clinical diagnostic workflows, potentially revolutionizing the precision & reliability of KO assessments. The study utilizes an osteoarthritis dataset from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) comprising images with 5 severity categories and uneven class distribution. While classic machine learning models like GaussianNB and KNN struggle in feature extraction, Convolutional Neural Networks such as Inception-V3, VGG-19 achieve better accuracy between 55-65% by learning hierarchical visual patterns. However, Vision Transformer architectures like Da-VIT, GCViT and MaxViT emerge as indisputable champions, displaying 66.14% accuracy, 0.703 precision, 0.614 recall, AUC exceeding 0.835 thanks to self-attention processes.