Enhanced swin transformer with dual attention for knee osteoarthritis severity grading from X-ray images

Osteoarthritis of the knee (OA) is a common degenerative condition that affects quality of life and mobility, especially in older adults. For disease management and treatment planning to be successful, early and precise diagnosis is essential. In order to classify the severity of osteoarthritis (OA) from knee X-ray pictures, this study suggests a new hybrid deep learning framework called Swin-O-NETS. It combines a Fast Extreme Learning Network (FELN) with a Modified Swin Transformer with Multi-Headed Channel Self-Attention for feature extraction. For evaluation, 2,047 radiographs from five Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) severity classes were taken from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) dataset on Kaggle. Our model outperformed traditional CNN, ResNet, DenseNet, and ensemble methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 99.4% accuracy, 99.0% precision, 98.9% recall, 98.3% specificity, and 98.8% F1-score respectively. These findings show that the suggested approach, which has better robustness and less computational complexity, can consistently help with early OA grading. Future research will concentrate on integrating multimodal imaging data, producing lightweight versions for use in real-time healthcare systems, and testing the model on larger multi-center clinical datasets.