2018 Volume 36 Issue 5 Pages 238-242
There are 700,000 of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) patients in Japan, and the number of patients is increased by 30,000 annually. Early treatment is effective to improve patientʼs prognosis. However, the appropriate treatment is required according to the progress of Rheumatoid Arthritis. The modified Total Sharp (mTS) score evaluates the progression of RA on the hand or foot X-ray. The mTS score evaluation is required several times a year for the effective treatment of RA. The mTS score assessment needs very long time. The automatic mTS score calculation system is required. This paper proposes the finger joint detection method and the mTS score calculation method using Support Vector Machine. Experimental results on 90 RA patientʼs X-ray images showed that the proposed method detects finger joints with accuracy of 81.4 (％), and estimated the erosion and JSN score with accuracy of 56.1, 60.4 (％), respectively.
