ClinNet: Evidential Ordinal Regression with Bilateral Asymmetry and Prototype Memory for Knee Osteoarthritis Grading

Abstract: Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) grading based on radiographic images is a critical yet challenging task due to subtle inter-grade differences, annotation uncertainty, and the inherently ordinal nature of disease progression. Conventional deep learning approaches typically formulate this problem as deterministic multi-class classification, ignoring both the continuous progression of degeneration and the uncertainty in expert annotations. In this work, we propose ClinNet, a novel trustworthy framework that addresses KOA grading as an evidential ordinal regression problem. The proposed method integrates three key components: (1) a Bilateral Asymmetry Encoder (BAE) that explicitly models medial-lateral structural discrepancies; (2) a Diagnostic Memory Bank that maintains class-wise prototypes to stabilize feature representations; and (3) an Evidential Ordinal Head based on the Normal-Inverse-Gamma (NIG) distribution to jointly estimate continuous KL grades and epistemic uncertainty. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ClinNet achieves a Quadratic Weighted Kappa of 0.892 and Accuracy of 0.768, statistically outperforming state-of-the-art baselines (p < 0.001). Crucially, we demonstrate that the model's uncertainty estimates successfully flag out-of-distribution samples and potential misdiagnoses, paving the way for safe clinical deployment.