Joseph Kim

C. Justice
9/30/18

The Faster the Assessment the Faster the Treatment

Computer-aided Diagnosis system for Rheumatoid Arthritis using Machine Learning
Syoji Kobashi, Kento Morita, Manabu Nii, Atsuki Tashita

JAPAN – Rheumatoid Arthritis affects over 700,000 patients in Japan and increases by 30,000
every year. With this number continuing to grow, effective diagnosis and detection are necessary
to help treat and improve the condition of these patients.
The focus is not on the treatment of affected individuals, but the process of detection for a range
of cases. Standard procedures for arthritis assessment occur multiple times per year and are often
lengthy making it difficult to personalize the treatment. The patient needs appropriate treatment
for their specific arthritis progression and with the lengthy assessment, they might not be able to
obtain the most optimal information for their current situation. Hence the faster they obtain the
diagnosis, the faster they are able to begin proper treatment. With the increasing number of total
patients each year, it would be ideal for an efficient system to effectively assist the incredibly
high number of affected individuals.
The authors developed a new way to use machine learning to detect finger joint position and
modified Total Sharp score (MTS), which is a manual evaluation of the erosion and joint space
narrowing on the hand and feet joints, to specifically aid patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis
differing from various methods that may be available today. This method of machine learning
breaks down the X-ray image into 14 image patches per hand to section of each of the individual
joints and compares it to the manual input. In a study conducted, including 45 mild to severe
Rheumatoid arthritis patients, yielded an 80% accuracy rate with an estimated modified Total
Sharp score of around 50-60%. With further study and increased implementation, the proposed
method will be able to increase accuracy in finger joint detection and MTS score estimation. The
machine learning algorithm works in a way that the more data it is given, the more effective the
method will be.
About University of Hyogo
The University of Hyogo is a public institution located in Kobe, Japan. All the authors are a part
of the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Hyogo, which is highly ranked and
rated research activity on Engineering in “The University Ranking”, 2010 edition.

K. Morita, A. Tashita, M. Nii and S. Kobashi, "Computer-aided diagnosis system for Rheumatoid Arthritis using
machine learning," 2017 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics (ICMLC),
Ningbo, 2017, pp. 357-360.