Adaptive time-frequency analysis of knee joint vibroarthrographic signals for noninvasive screening of articular cartilage pathology.

Vibroarthrographic (VAG) signals emitted by human knee joints are nonstationary and multicomponent in nature; time-frequency distributions (TFD's) provide powerful means to analyze such signals. The objective of this paper is to construct adaptive TFD's of VAG signals suitable for feature extraction. An adaptive TFD was constructed by minimum cross-entropy optimization of the TFD obtained by the matching pursuit decomposition algorithm. Parameters of VAG signals such as energy, energy spread, frequency, and frequency spread were extracted from their adaptive TFD's. The parameters carry information about the combined TF dynamics of the signals. The mean and standard deviation of the parameters were computed, and each VAG signal was represented by a set of just six features. Statistical pattern classification experiments based on logistic regression analysis of the parameters showed an overall normal/abnormal screening accuracy of 68.9% with 90 VAG signals (51 normals and 39 abnormals), and a higher accuracy of 77.5% with a database of 71 signals with 51 normals and 20 abnormals of a specific type of patellofemoral disorder. The proposed method of VAG signal analysis is independent of joint angle and clinical information, and shows good potential for noninvasive diagnosis and monitoring of patellofemoral disorders such as chondromalacia patella.