RibFractureSys: A gem in the face of acute rib fracture diagnoses

Rib fracture patients, common in trauma wards, have different mortality rates and comorbidities depending on how many and which ribs are fractured. This knowledge is therefore paramount to make accurate prognoses and prioritize patient care. However, tracking 24 ribs over upwards 200+ frames in a patient’s scan is time-consuming and error-prone for radiologists, especially depending on their experience.

We propose an automated, modular, three-stage solution to assist radiologists. Using 9 fully annotated patient scans, we trained a multi-class U-Net to segment rib lesions and common anatomical clutter. To recognize rib fractures and mitigate false positives, we fine-tuned a ResNet-based model using 5698 false positives, 2037 acute fractures, 4786 healed fractures, and 14,904 unfractured rib lesions. Using almost 200 patient cases, we developed a highly task-customized multi-object rib lesion tracker to determine which lesions in a frame belong to which of the 12 ribs on either side; bounding box intersection over union- and centroid-based tracking, a line-crossing methodology, and various heuristics were utilized. Our system accepts an axial CT scan and processes, labels, and color-codes the scan.

Over an internal validation dataset of 1000 acute rib fracture and 1000 control patients, our system, assessed by a 3-year radiologist resident, achieved 96.1% and 97.3% correct fracture classification accuracy for rib fracture and control patients, respectively. However, 18.0% and 20.8% of these patients, respectively, had incorrect rib labeling. Percentages remained consistent across sex and age demographics. Labeling issues include anatomical clutter being mislabeled as ribs and ribs going unlabeled.