Scaphoid Fracture Detection and Localization Using Denoising Diffusion Models

Background/Objectives: Scaphoid fractures are a common wrist injury, typically diagnosed and treated through X-ray imaging, a process that is often time-consuming. Among the various types of scaphoid fractures, occult and nondisplaced fractures pose significant diagnostic challenges due to their subtle appearance and variable bone density, complicating accurate identification via X-ray images. Therefore, creating a reliable assist diagnostic system based on deep learning for the scaphoid fracture detection and localization is critical. Methods: This study proposes a scaphoid fracture detection and localization framework based on diffusion models. In Stage I, we augment the training data set by embedding fracture anomalies. Pseudofracture regions are generated on healthy scaphoid images, producing healthy and fractured data sets, forming a self-supervised learning strategy that avoids the complex and time-consuming manual annotation of medical images. In Stage II, a diffusion-based reconstruction model learns the features of healthy scaphoid images to perform high-quality reconstruction of pseudofractured scaphoid images, generating healthy scaphoid images. In Stage III, a U-Net-like network identifies differences between the target and reconstructed images, using these differences to determine whether the target scaphoid image contains a fracture. Results: After model training, we evaluated its diagnostic performance on real scaphoid images by comparing the model's results with precise fracture locations further annotated by physicians. The proposed method achieved an image area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.993 for scaphoid fracture detection, corresponding to an accuracy of 0.983, recall of 1.00, and precision of 0.975. For fracture localization, the model achieved a pixel AUROC of 0.978 and a pixel region overlap of 0.921. Conclusions: This study shows promise as a reliable, powerful, and scalable solution for the scaphoid fracture detection and localization. Experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of the denoising diffusion models; these models can significantly reduce diagnostic time while precisely localizing potential fracture regions, identifying conditions overlooked by the human eye.