Automatic type Identification of Sub - Axial Vertebral Column Fractures using Deep learning Technique

Traumas like falls, sports injuries, or vehicle accidents are the main causes of Vertebral Column Fracture(VCFs) or spine fracture. The symptoms of VCF include back pain, swelling, numbness, and height decrease. VCF causes extreme pain, paralysis, difficulty in movement, etc. CT scans are inexpensive and effective in providing precise and quick VCF type detection. The determination of type VCF, however subject to inter-observer variability. To address this limitation this work introduces an automatic system for the detection of VCF type based on an ensemble of deep fine tuned models. This can assist the orthopaedicians in type identification of VCF which decreases the image interpretation time and increases the patient care time. For type identification, a total of two fine-tuned CNN architectures are used. Then, to further enhance the type identification performance, we developed an ensemble model of fine tuned VGG16 and ResNet50 deep learning models, which average the outputs of the models during final prediction. We used a dataset of 2820 CT images from eight different VCF types that were collected from Kasturba Medical college, Manipal Academy of Higher education, Manipal. The results shows that the ensemble model performs well compare to individual fine-tuned models with accuracy of 82%, precision of 0.84, recall of 0.82 and F1-score of 0.81 for VCF type identification from CT scans. This study shows that type identification of VCF in CT scans may be successfully accomplished using an ensemble deep transfer learning system with various fine tuned CNN architectures.