A Hybrid Automatic Model for Circle Detection in X-Ray Imagery: A Case Study on Hip Prosthesis Wear

This study presents a fully automatic hybrid framework for circle detection and geometric feature extraction from anteroposterior (AP) X-ray images. Detecting circular structures in X-ray imagery is challenging due to low contrast, noise, and metal-induced artifacts, which often limit the robustness of purely learning-based or purely geometric approaches. To address these challenges, a hybrid deep learning and computer vision pipeline is proposed that combines data-driven region localization with robust geometric fitting. A YOLOv5-based detector is first employed to identify a compact region of interest (ROI) containing circular components. Within this ROI, edge-based processing using Canny detection is applied, followed by an Edge-Snap refinement stage and robust RANSAC-based circle fitting with a Hough-transform fallback to ensure anatomically plausible circle estimation. The resulting circle centers and radii provide stable geometric parameters that can be consistently extracted across images with varying contrast, noise levels, and prosthesis appearances. The applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a case study on hip prosthesis wear analysis, where the automatically detected circle parameters are used to compute medial, superior, and resultant displacement components using established two-dimensional radiographic formulations. Experimental evaluation on AP hip radiographs shows that the YOLOv5 detector achieves high ROI localization performance (mAP@0.5 = 0.971) and that the hybrid pipeline produces consistent circle parameters across longitudinal image sequences. Overall, the proposed method provides an end-to-end automatic solution for robust circle detection in X-ray imagery, with hip prosthesis wear presented solely as a case study without clinical or diagnostic claims.