Automated Rib Fracture Detection on Chest X-Ray Using Contrastive Learning

To develop a deep learning-based model for detecting rib fractures on chest X-Ray and to evaluate its performance based on a multicenter study. Chest digital radiography (DR) images from 18,631 subjects were used for the training, testing, and validation of the deep learning fracture detection model. We first built a pretrained model, a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations (simCLR), using contrastive learning with the training set. Then, simCLR was used as the backbone for a fully convolutional one-stage (FCOS) objective detection network to identify rib fractures from chest X-ray images. The detection performance of the network for four different types of rib fractures was evaluated using the testing set. A total of 127 images from Data-CZ and 109 images from Data-CH with the annotations for four types of rib fractures were used for evaluation. The results showed that for Data-CZ, the sensitivities of the detection model with no pretraining, pretrained ImageNet, and pretrained DR were 0.465, 0.735, and 0.822, respectively, and the average number of false positives per scan was five in all cases. For the Data-CH test set, the sensitivities of three different pretraining methods were 0.403, 0.655, and 0.748. In the identification of four fracture types, the detection model achieved the highest performance for displaced fractures, with sensitivities of 0.873 and 0.774 for the Data-CZ and Data-CH test sets, respectively, with 5 false positives per scan, followed by nondisplaced fractures, buckle fractures, and old fractures. A pretrained model can significantly improve the performance of the deep learning-based rib fracture detection based on X-ray images, which can reduce missed diagnoses and improve the diagnostic efficacy.