Objective  To explore the feasibility of automatic grading of knee osteoarthritis (KOA) severity by using X-ray film training model on public artificial intelligence platform.

  Methods  The Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) staging system was selected to determine stages of the X-ray films, and the model was trained on a public artificial intelligence platform.Finally, 1 445 images were used for automatic training and test evaluation.A test set of 50 images was used to test the model and the radiologists, and accuracy and F1-score of the radiologists were calculated and compared with the results returned by the model in the artificial intelligence platform.

  Results  The accuracy of the model to the automatic training set of artificial intelligence platform was 0.73 and F1-score was 0.72; the accuracy of the model was 0.70 and F1-score was 0.69 for the test subset of 50 images; the accuracy of the radiologists test was 0.64 and F1-score was 0.63.Model performance matched or even exceeded that of senior radiologists.

  Conclusion  It is feasible and advantageous to train the model based on public artificial intelligence platform and use X-ray image to perform automatic staging of KOA by KL.