Oliver Mills

Research Topic: Using computer vision to evaluate the meniscus in knee osteoarthritis utilizing a 45000 MRI scan dataset.

Supervisors: Dr Samuel Relton, Dr Nishant Ravikumar, Prof Philip Conaghan, Dr Sarah Kingsbury.

About Oliver: I graduated from the University of Manchester with an integrated masters in Physics. My final year project involved using CNNs to categories cardiac arrhythmia types from ECG recordings.

Project Description: Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a particularly common type of osteoarthritis, with over 8 million people in the UK forecast to have symptomatic knee OA by 2035. The primary clinical problem is joint pain, for which there are few effective therapies. Detection of the disease before irreversible changes to the structure have occurred could be crucial for early management. This project will focus on the menisci, two semi-lunar, wedge-shaped structures found within the knee joint. Understanding the patterns of meniscus pathology, their progression and their relationship to other pathologies like cartilage loss and symptoms offers potential to understand clinical targets for early knee OA interventions. This project will use the OsteoArthritis Initiative (OAI) dataset, a large dataset of 4796 patients with MRI images of both knees with annual follow-up for 8 years.