Detection of knee joint diseases using acoustical pattern recognition technique Abstract A method of analyzing the sound emitted

d by normal and pathological knee joints during active movements has been developed. The technique is brief and painless and lends itself well to an arthritis screening program. The knee sound is recorded on magnetic tape during active motion of the knee. Background noise is minimized using the principle of noise cancellation thereby permitting analysis of what might be renamed an acoustic signature. This signature is the product of pattern recognition technique applied to random noise. Studies of knee recordings covering normal, rheumatoid arthritic and degenerative knees show that their respective waveforms, spectral patterns and statistical property of auto-correlation appear to be unique, and therefore, may well prove to be a promising noninvasive diagnostic tool for early detection of the type and extent of knee joint damage. Analysis of knee joint sound signals for non-invasive diagnosis of cartilage pathology The need for a safe, objective, noninvasive tool for the early detection, localization, and quantification of both hyaline articular cartilage and meniscal pathology in the knee is discussed, and the possible use of joint sounds for this purpose is examined. A historical survey of joint sound analysis is given, and the authors' own research is described. The analysis of the knee joint sounds, using time-domain signal plots and three-dimensional spectral plots, supported the authors' assumptions regarding the nature of various degrees of chondromalacia and meniscal lesions, and the associated sounds. Quantitative features such as energy, frequency peaks, duration of signal components, and bandwidths can be easily computed from the data. Further subclassification, however, would require more accurate quantification or parametric representation of signal features, which should be possible by modeling techniques such as linear prediction.<>

Published in: Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE (Volume:9 , Issue: 1 )

Date of Publication: March 1990

Page(s): 65 - 68 ISSN : 0739-5175 INSPEC Accession Number: 3745123 Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/51.62910 Date of Current Version : 06 August 2002 Issue Date : March 1990 Sponsored by : IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society