A novel framework integrating ensemble transfer learning and Ant Colony Optimization for Knee Osteoarthritis severity classification

Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA), the most prevalent joint disease, significantly impacts elderly mobility due to progressive cartilage degeneration. Early prediction is crucial for preventing disease progression and guiding effective treatment plans. This paper proposes an EnsembleTL-ACO, fully automated, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for accurate and rapid KOA severity grading. The proposed CAD system leverages an ensemble transfer learning strategy to extract robust deep features by fusing multiple deep learning models. It combines features from two consecutive AI models: (1) AlexNet for implicit class-wise deep feature extraction from preprocessed data, and (2) a custom IsrNet for further feature depth. Unsupervised k-means clustering based on PCA dimensionality reduction decomposes each class into subgroups, further refining features. Finally, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) selects the most informative features. Evaluated on the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) dataset, the proposed system achieves high accuracy in classifying the five KOA severity grades. With 1000 optimized features, it reaches average overall accuracies of 89.89% and 85.44% using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifiers, respectively. This surpasses recent deep learning methods, demonstrating significant improvement. This novel CAD system presents a promising solution for practical applications, offering an accurate AI-powered tool for KOA diagnosis and management. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.