Development of a bone annotation and scoring software for Psoriatic Arthritis radiograph damage detection

Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) is a debilitating disease which causes pain and inflammation to the joint. Tracking disease progression relies on trained rheumatologists scoring hand and feet xrays for damage. The evolution of these scores is important in determining the type of treatment that patient are given but this process is lengthy and costly, often taking up to an hour per hand x-ray. We want to use machine learning and computer vision to speed this up, but this requires the areas where damage occurs to be delineated. We have developed an annotation software called aspax which allows users to annotate PsA x-rays. The collected data will then be used to investigate potential machine learning methods as well as refining an existing segmentation algorithm developed by the team.