Machine learning-based prediction of the necessity for the surgical treatment of distal radius fractures

Treatments for distal radius fractures (DRFs) are determined by various factors. Therefore, quantitative or qualitative tools have been introduced to assist in deciding the treatment approach. This study aimed to develop a machine learning (ML) model that determines the need for surgical treatment in patients with DRFs using a ML model that incorporates various clinical data concatenated with plain radiographs in the anteroposterior and lateral views.

Radiographic and clinical data from 1,139 patients were collected and used to train the ML models. To analyze and integrate data effectively, the proposed ML model was mainly composed of a U-Net-based image feature extractor for radiographs, a multilayer perceptron based clinical feature extractor for clinical data, and a final classifier that combined the extracted features to predict the necessity of surgical treatment. To promote interpretability and support clinical adoption, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) was employed to provide visual insights into the radiographic data. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) were utilized to elucidate the contributions of each clinical feature to the predictions of the model.

The model integrating image and clinical data achieved accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 92.98%, 93.28%, and 92.55%, respectively, in predicting the need for surgical treatment in patients with DRFs. These findings demonstrate the enhanced performance of the integrated model compared to the image-only model. In the Grad-CAM heatmaps, key regions such as the radiocarpal joint, volar, and dorsal cortex of the radial metaphysis were highlighted, indicating critical areas for model training. The SHAP results indicated that being female and having subsequent or concomitant fractures were strongly associated with the need for surgical treatment.

The proposed ML models may assist in assessing the need for surgical treatment in patients with DRFs. By improving the accuracy of treatment decisions, this model may enhance the success rate of fracture treatments, guiding clinical decisions and improving efficiency in clinical settings.