# VL-OrdinalFormer: Vision Language Guided Ordinal Transformers for Interpretable Knee Osteoarthritis Grading Source: [VL-OrdinalFormer: Vision Language Guided Ordinal Transformers for Interpretable Knee Osteoarthritis Grading]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-01-07T05:00:04.580Z Authors: Zahid Ullah, Jihie Kim Published: 2025-12-31T03:01:31.000Z ## Abstract Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a leading cause of disability worldwide, and accurate severity assessment using the Kellgren Lawrence (KL) grading system is critical for clinical decision making. However, radiographic distinctions between early disease stages, particularly KL1 and KL2, are subtle and frequently lead to inter-observer variability among radiologists. To address these challenges, we propose VLOrdinalFormer, a vision language guided ordinal learning framework for fully automated KOA grading from knee radiographs. The proposed method combines a ViT L16 backbone with CORAL based ordinal regression and a Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP) driven semantic alignment module, allowing the model to incorporate clinically meaningful textual concepts related to joint space narrowing, osteophyte formation, and subchondral sclerosis. To improve robustness and mitigate overfitting, we employ stratified five fold cross validation, class aware re weighting to emphasize challenging intermediate grades, and test time augmentation with global threshold optimization. Experiments conducted on the publicly available OAI kneeKL224 dataset demonstrate that VLOrdinalFormer achieves state of the art performance, outperforming CNN and ViT baselines in terms of macro F1 score and overall accuracy. Notably, the proposed framework yields substantial performance gains for KL1 and KL2 without compromising classification accuracy for mild or severe cases. In addition, interpretability analyses using Grad CAM and CLIP similarity maps confirm that the model consistently attends to clinically relevant anatomical regions. These results highlight the potential of vision language aligned ordinal transformers as reliable and interpretable tools for KOA grading and disease progression assessment in routine radiological practice. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Knee Osteoarthritis Grading on OAI (official held-out test)](): Knee Osteoarthritis Grading; OAI (official held-out test); Accuracy: 0.7029. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()