Adversarial generative models applied to diagnosing Osteoarthritis

Evaluating different techniques for fine-tuning discriminator models to classify osteoarthritis

Bachelor Thesis (2025)
Author(s)

T.W. den Boer (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor(s)

G. van Tulder – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)

JH Krijthe – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)

Michael Weinmann – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)

Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Graduation Date
25-06-2025
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Project
['CSE3000 Research Project']
Programme
['Computer Science and Engineering']
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
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Abstract

Osteoarthritis is a chronic joint disease in which the protective cartilage between bones deteriorates over time, leading to pain, stiffness, and reduced mobility. Diagnosis is a time-consuming and somewhat subjective process. To address this challenge, machine learning techniques can be applied. However, training supervised models on medical images is often challenging because of the limited availability of labeled training data. Self-supervised methods, which pretrain models to learn useful features without labels, offer a potential solution to this issue. In this paper, we explore the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as a pre-training step for osteoarthritis diagnosis. The first step is the training of a GAN on a semi-public dataset of x-ray images. In the second stage, we explore different strategies for fine-tuning the discriminator model to diagnose osteoarthritis. Our experiments suggest that while GAN-based pre-training offers slight improvements over purely supervised approaches, the performance gains remain modest.

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