Stacked Ensemble of Fine-Tuned CNNs for Knee Osteoarthritis Severity Grading

2025/11/27 by Gupta, Adarsh, Kaur, Japleen, Doshi, Tanvi +3
#Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.22143

Abstract

Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a musculoskeletal condition that can cause significant limitations and impairments in daily activities, especially among older individuals. To evaluate the severity of KOA, typically, X-ray images of the affected knee are analyzed, and a grade is assigned based on the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grading system, which classifies KOA severity into five levels, ranging from 0 to 4. This approach requires a high level of expertise and time and is susceptible to subjective interpretation, thereby introducing potential diagnostic inaccuracies. To address this problem a stacked ensemble model of fine-tuned Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) was developed for two classification tasks: a binary classifier for detecting the presence of KOA, and a multiclass classifier for precise grading across the KL spectrum. The proposed stacked ensemble model consists of a diverse set of pre-trained architectures, including MobileNetV2, You Only Look Once (YOLOv8), and DenseNet201 as base learners and Categorical Boosting (CatBoost) as the meta-learner. This proposed model had a balanced test accuracy of 73% in multiclass classification and 87.5% in binary classification, which is higher than previous works in extant literature.

Citations

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• Automatic Grading of Individual Knee Osteoarthritis Features in Plain Radiographs using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
• Automatic Grading of Knee Osteoarthritis on the Kellgren-Lawrence Scale from Radiographs Using Convolutional Neural Networks