A Sample-Encoding Generalization of the Kohonen Associative Memory and Application to Knee Kinematic Data Representation and Pathology Classification

Knee kinematic data consist of a small sample of high-dimensional vectors recording repeated measurements of the temporal variation of each of the three fundamental angles of knee three-dimensional rotation during a walking cycle. In applications such as knee pathology classification, the notorious problems of high-dimensionality (the curse of dimensionality), high intra-class variability, and inter-class similarity make this data generally difficult to interpret. In the face of these difficulties, the purpose of this study is to investigate knee kinematic data classification by a Kohonen neural network generalized to encode samples of multidimensional data vectors rather than single such vectors as in the standard network. The network training algorithm and its ensuing classification function both use the Hotelling T 2 statistic to evaluate the underlying sample similarity, thus affording efficient use of training data for network development and robust classification of observed data. Applied to knee osteoarthritis pathology discrimination, namely the femoro-rotulian (FR) and femoro-tibial (FT) categories, the scheme improves on the state-of-the-art methods.