Comparing the Accuracy of Radiography and Sonography in Detection of Knee Osteoarthritis: A Diagnostic Study

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common degenerative disorder occurring in elderly people. Radiography and sonography are convenient techniques to detect diverse pathological features of knee OA.
 BACKGROUND: Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common degenerative disorder occurring in older people. Radiography and sonography are convenient techniques to detect diverse pathological features of knee OA.
 AIM: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of radiography and sonography in the detection of diverse features of knee OA.
 METHODS: In a prospective cross-sectional diagnostic accuracy study, 50 consecutive patients with suspected knee OA (40 women and 10 men, mean age 41.2 ± 6.1 years), referred to the rheumatology clinic of the Shohada Hospital of Khorramabad. All obtained magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), radiographic and sonography images were evaluated by two radiologists and rheumatologist with sufficient expertise in degenerative knee disorders. MRI has been considered as a gold standard test in evaluating other tests. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive values (PPV), negative predictive values (NPV) and accuracy with 95% confidence intervals of radiography and sonography in the diagnosis of knee OA were calculated.
 RESULTS: Prevalence of the marginal osteophyte, geode and decreased joint thickness were significantly higher in patients with age > 40 years compared to ≤ 40 years (P ˂ 0.05). The incidence of diverse features of knee OA was not significantly different in terms of the patient’s gender, except for decreased joint space. The specificity of radiography was higher than its sensitivity.
 CONCLUSION: Our study showed that both radiography and sonography are useful imaging modalities, especially to diagnosis the positive cases of knee OA. The specificity of radiography is higher than to its sensitivity for all pathological features of knee OA. The sensitivity of sonography to detect some features of knee OA such as decreased joint thickness is considerably higher than radiography.

On-site Ultrasound Screens out Asymptomatic Knee Lesions in Elite Adolescent Male Basketball Players

“…Novel techniques taking knee articular motion into consideration was shown to be more valid to significantly decrease false-negative diagnoses compared with fixed-angle transverse scanning [34] and it can be considered to be incorporated in future work. Also in previous study, ultrasonography has a very poor sensitivity for diagnosing patellar cartilage defect, which was reported to be 0 [17] and this pathology can also cause symptoms of knee derangement [35] and affect sports activity. These might explain the inferior correlation of IKDC-SKR with ultrasonography findings in this tested subject.…”

“…When it comes to sideline sports medicine, soft tissue ultrasonography bares advantages of high safety, non-radiative, highly portable, relatively cheap in price and the ability to allow dynamic testing at the field. For many common knee disorders mentioned above, research has shown good sensitivity and excellent specificity of ultrasonographic diagnosis confirmed with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [17]. Although recent study demonstrated excellent precision of ultrasonography as compared to MRI in the diagnosis of ACL and PCL tears and serve as immediate diagnosis in patients with acute knee trauma [18], we did not include ACL/PCL screening in our protocol since these injury is less likely to be "unknown" because of the injury almost always occur in an acute scenario.…”

Test–Retest Reliability and Sensitivity to Change of Ultrasound‐Based Methods of Measuring Synovial Inflammation in Knee Osteoarthritis

“…Additionally, our agreement estimates may be influenced by extraneous sources of error such as the time of day or the day of week of ratings, which may underestimate the correspondence between assessments. Our validity study lacks a gold standard comparator, although it has been previously reported that MRI and US measures of joint effusion, joint thickness, osteophyte, and meniscal pathology have excellent agreement (40). It has also been shown that US performs better or equal to radiography in measuring osteophytes, meniscal pathology, and cartilage damage (10).…”

Automated knee osteoarthritis severity classification using three‐stage preprocessing method andVGG16architecture

“…In the field of medical imaging, 3 various technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 1,7,8 computed tomography (CT) scan, 9,10 ultrasound, 11,12 and plain radiographs (X‐rays) are available for the diagnosis of KOA. The advantages like cost‐effectiveness, less exposure to radiation, and easy availability, make X‐ray the versatile and most widely used imaging modality for the diagnosis of knee OA 13–15 …”