2022 Volume 40 Issue 5 Pages 226-232
Rheumatoid arthritis causes systemic joint destruction and significantly interferes with quality of life for patients. The diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis is made by blood tests and X-ray imaging. Radiologist can easily monitor the disease progression using X-ray images, however it has the problems of increased burden on physicians and lack of reproducibility. Therefore, the development of computer aided diagnosis systems that use the results of computer analysis as a second opinion is expected. In this paper, we propose an image registration method for phalanges CR image to develop computer aided diagnosis system that detects the progression of rheumatoid arthritis from past and current images of the same patient using a temporal subtraction method. In this study, we develop a new method based on geometric matching CNN, which can be optimized for each image pair, to precisely align the phalanges region. We applied our proposed CNN method to 560 pairs of synthetic phalanges images and obtained TP of 99.26％ and FP of 0.79％ respectively, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with previous methods.
