Expert systems (ES) is a triumphant commercial product and enthralling research tool of artificial intelligence (AI) which transpired during early 1970s. ES is successfully employed in various fields like medical, agriculture, automatic control, data classification, decision analysis and airspace, specifically in medical field, where patient’s health and safety measures are important. Knee is the hinge joint which plays vital role in skeletal system of human. The whole-body weight is on the knee joint. A number of categories of diseases could affect this vital part of the body such as inflammatory diseases, infectious diseases, neoplastic diseases, injuries, etc. The proposed system is designed to diagnose the inflammatory diseases of knee namely osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and osteonecrosis using adaptive neuro-fuzzy technique.
1.1. Orthopaedic Diseases
With the advancement of the science, discovery of Roentgen’s rays (x-rays) and discovery of bacteria by Louis Pasteur the new era of diseases of skeletal system emerged. From this various bones and joints diseases were came under orthopaedic, which are known as orthopaedic diseases (Pandey et al., 2009).
The human skeletal is made up of 206 bones where each bone of skeletal system could be covered under Inflammatory, Infective, and neoplastic disorder. Moreover, the human body is comprised of various joints as synovial fibrous, ball and socket joint and hinge joints (Moskowitz et al., 2006). Under the orthopaedic, there are spine, elbow, knee, ankle, wrist and shoulder body parts. Knee joint is the main weight bearing joint, so we have focus special attention towards those large hinge joint of the body. Knee comprises of three bones. The lower bone of thigh which is called Femur, upper part of the leg bone called Tibia and the knee cap bone is known as Patella as shown in Figure 1 (Chandna, 2018).
The main area of interest in knee are inflammatory pathology that is Osteoarthritis of knee, Rheumatoid arthritis of knee and osteonecrosis of knee and infective pathology like septic arthritis which can be acute septic arthritis, chronic septic arthritis and tuberculosis of the knee. Inflammatory diseases mean inflammation to the bony and soft tissue structures of the knee joint that causes inflammatory arthritis (Singh et al., 2012). Following diseases come under the inflammatory diseases:
- •
Osteoarthritis: Osteoarthritis is a common joint disorder (Justice et al., 2012). This is the progressive softening and disintegration of the articular cartilage. It is accompanied by new growth of cartilage and bone at the joint margin;
- •
Rheumatoid arthritis: Rheumatoid is an auto immune disease. It is the commonest cause of the chronic inflammatory disease. The most common characteristic features are elevated ESR, symmetrical polyarthritis and morning stiffness. Pathology of RA in knee, stage1 is synovitis and swelling in joint, stage 2 is early joint destruction with particular region and stage 3 is advanced joint destruction and deformity. This disease is common in all age group (children, young, old). It can be seropositive rheumatoid arthritis or seronegative rheumatoid arthritis. There are two outputs for the RA disease, one for adult and other for juvenile;
- •
Osteonecrosis: The avascular necrosis of the medial condyle of the femur is very common in the knee joint. It is often associated with the alcoholism and drug addictive. It is three times more common in females, above the age of 60 years.