Femoral head osteonecrosis is a disease affecting patients at the age of 30-50 that usually progresses to femoral head collapse and often leads to total hip arthroplasty. Femoral head osteonecrosis frequently progresses to the subchondral fracture of femoral head, eventually leading to complete joint destruction.
Joint-preserving surgical interventions are generally more successful at earlier stages of bone involvement than after the occurrence of subchondral fracture. It means that the optimal time to evaluate and treat osteonecrosis of femoral head is before the occurrence of subchondral fracture. Early diagnosis can facilitate the application of interventions that can avoid or delay arthroplasty to some extent. However, misdiagnoses and delayed diagnoses are common due to the lack of preliminary symptoms, typical features, and internal fixation interference on radiographs.
Kim Ju Hyang, a researcher at the Faculty of Information Science and Technology, investigated the problem of extracting significant features for detecting bone diseases such as avascular necrosis and osteoporosis of femoral head from radiographic images of femoral head, and classifiers. On this basis, he proposed a method for early diagnosis of femoral head osteonecrosis by feature extraction and classifiers.
She performed feature extraction by 2D Dual tree complex wavelet transform, and early detection by support vector machine (SVM). Using 2D Dual tree complex wavelet transform on femoral radiographs, she extracted high-frequency component features based on six-way complex wavelet coefficients of femoral head images. Then, she selected the most significant features for classification among the spatial domain features and other features significant for avascular necrosis detection to construct feature vectors and designed a support vector machine classifier.
The experimental results show that the proposed method is cost-effective due to the use of X-ray images and has excellent detection performance.
If further information is needed, you can refer to her paper “Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform-Based X-Ray Image Feature Extraction and Early Diagnosis of Femoral Head Osteonecrosis by Support Vector Machine” in “Proceedings of KUTIC-2025”.