Nowadays, the world is struggling with the problems of an aging society. With the increasing share of older people in the population, degenerative joint diseases are a growing problem. The result of progressive degenerative changes in joints is primarily the deterioration of the patients' quality of life and their gradual exclusion from activity and social life. The ability to effectively, non-invasively and quickly detect cases of chondromalacia of the knee joints is a challenge for modern medicine. The possibility of early detection of progressive degenerative changes allows for the appropriate selection of treatment protocols and significantly increases the chances of inhibiting the development of degenerative diseases of the musculoskeletal system. The article presents a non-invasive method for detecting degenerative changes in the knee joints based on recurrence analysis and classification using neural networks. The result of the analyzes was a classification accuracy of 91.07% in the case of MLP neural networks and 80.36% for RBF networks. Keywords: knee joint, cartilage, lubrication, wear, osteoarthritis, RBF, MLP.