Abnormality Detection in Musculoskeletal Radiographs with Convolutional Neural Networks(Ensembles) and Performance Optimization

TL;DR

This study develops ensemble convolutional neural network models to improve abnormality detection in musculoskeletal radiographs, aiming to enhance diagnostic accuracy and reduce variability compared to existing models.

Contribution

Introduces an ensemble CNN model that outperforms a DenseNet model in F1 score and reduces performance variability across different musculoskeletal studies.

Findings

Ensemble200 model achieved higher F1 scores than DenseNet.

Reduced Cohen Kappa score variability across studies.

Improved performance on finger radiograph studies.

Abstract

Musculoskeletal conditions affect more than 1.7 billion people worldwide based on a study by Global Burden Disease, and they are the second greatest cause of disability[1,2]. The diagnosis of these conditions vary but mostly physical exams carried out and image tests. There are few imaging and diagnostic experts while there is a huge workload of radiograph examinations which might affect diagnostic accuracy. We built machine learning models to perform abnormality detection using the available musculoskeletal public dataset [3]. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) were used as are the most successful models in performing various tasks such as classification and object detection [4]. The development of the models involved theoretical study, iterative prototyping, and empirical evaluation of the results. The current model, 169 layer DenseNet, by Pranav et al.(2018) on the abnormality detection task, the performance was lower than the worst radiologist in 5 out of the 7 studies, and the overall model performance was lower than the best radiologist. We developed the ensemble200 model which scored 0.66 Cohen Kappa which was lower than the DenseNet model (Pranav et al, 2018) but the model performance with the F1 score outperforms the DenseNet model and its Cohen Kappa score variability with the different studies is lower as the best cohen kappa score on the upper extremity studies is 0.7408 (Wrist) and the lowest is (0.5844) hand. The ensemble200 model outperformed DenseNet model on the finger studies with a Cohen Kappa score of 0.653 showing reduced performance variability on the model performance.