title: Quantification of knee vibroarthrographic signal irregularity associated with patellofemoral joint cartilage pathology based on entropy and envelope amplitude measures.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Injury of knee joint cartilage may result in pathological vibrations between the articular surfaces during extension and flexion motions. The aim of this paper is to analyze and quantify vibroarthrographic (VAG) signal irregularity associated with articular cartilage degeneration and injury in the patellofemoral joint.
  
  
  METHODS
  The symbolic entropy (SyEn), approximate entropy (ApEn), fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn), and the mean, standard deviation, and root-mean-squared (RMS) values of the envelope amplitude, were utilized to quantify the signal fluctuations associated with articular cartilage pathology of the patellofemoral joint. The quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), generalized logistic regression analysis (GLRA), and support vector machine (SVM) methods were used to perform signal pattern classifications.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The experimental results showed that the patients with cartilage pathology (CP) possess larger SyEn and ApEn, but smaller FuzzyEn, over the statistical significance level of the Wilcoxon rank-sum test (p<0.01), than the healthy subjects (HS). The mean, standard deviation, and RMS values computed from the amplitude difference between the upper and lower signal envelopes are also consistently and significantly larger (p<0.01) for the group of CP patients than for the HS group. The SVM based on the entropy and envelope amplitude features can provide superior classification performance as compared with QDA and GLRA, with an overall accuracy of 0.8356, sensitivity of 0.9444, specificity of 0.8, Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.6599, and an area of 0.9212 under the receiver operating characteristic curve.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The SyEn, ApEn, and FuzzyEn features can provide useful information about pathological VAG signal irregularity based on different entropy metrics. The statistical parameters of signal envelope amplitude can be used to characterize the temporal fluctuations related to the cartilage pathology.
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Technology, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China; Fujian Key Laboratory of Sensing and Computing for Smart City, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China. Electronic address: y.wu@ieee.org.
authors.forename: Yunfeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Technology, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China.
authors.forename: Pinnan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Technology, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.affiliation: Department of Rehabilitation, Xiamen University Affiliated Zhongshan Hospital, 201 Hubin South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361004, China.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Technology, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China.
authors.forename: Lifang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Liao
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Technology, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China.
authors.forename: Yuchen
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Technology, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China.
authors.forename: Meihong
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada.
authors.forename: Rangaraj M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Rangayyan
mesh_terms: D002358:Cartilage, Articular / Q000503:physiopathology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D019277:Entropy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007719:Knee Joint / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008297:Male
keywords: Approximate entropy; Articular cartilage; Fuzzy entropy; Knee joint; Symbolic entropy; Vibroarthrography