Scaphoid Fracture Detection by Using Convolutional Neural Network

Scaphoid fractures frequently appear in injury radiograph, but approximately 20% are occult. While there are few studies in the fracture detection of X-ray scaphoid images, their effectiveness is insignificant in detecting the scaphoid fractures. Traditional image processing technology had been applied to segment interesting areas of X-ray images, but it always suffered from the requirements of manual intervention and a large amount of computational time. To date, the models of convolutional neural networks have been widely applied to medical image recognition; thus, this study proposed a two-stage convolutional neural network to detect scaphoid fractures. In the first stage, the scaphoid bone is separated from the X-ray image using the Faster R-CNN network. The second stage uses the ResNet model as the backbone for feature extraction, and uses the feature pyramid network and the convolutional block attention module to develop the detection and classification models for scaphoid fractures. Various metrics such as recall, precision, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) are used to evaluate our proposed method’s performance. The scaphoid bone detection achieved an accuracy of 99.70%. The results of scaphoid fracture detection with the rotational bounding box revealed a recall of 0.789, precision of 0.894, accuracy of 0.853, sensitivity of 0.789, specificity of 0.90, and AUC of 0.920. The resulting scaphoid fracture classification had the following performances: recall of 0.735, precision of 0.898, accuracy of 0.829, sensitivity of 0.735, specificity of 0.920, and AUC of 0.917. According to the experimental results, we found that the proposed method can provide effective references for measuring scaphoid fractures. It has a high potential to consider the solution of detection of scaphoid fractures. In the future, the integration of images of the anterior–posterior and lateral views of each participant to develop more powerful convolutional neural networks for fracture detection by X-ray radiograph is probably important to research.