USE OF CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS FOR X-RAY IMAGE ORIENTATION DETERMINATION

The fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) based algorithms exhibit a high performance on image classification tasks has been shown many times. Still, certain issues exist with the application of machine learning (ML) artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms. The best known is the need for a large amount of statistically varied data, which can be addressed with expanded collection or data augmentation. Other issues are also present. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) show extremely high performance on image-shaped data. Despite their performance, CNNs exhibit a large issue which is the sensitivity to image orientation. Previous research shows that varying the orientation of images may greatly lower the performance of the trained CNN. This is especially problematic in certain applications, such as X-ray radiography, an example of which is presented here. Previous research shows that the performance of CNNs is higher when used on images in a single orientation (left or right), as opposed to the combination of both. This means that the data needs to be differentiated before it enters the classification model. In this paper, the CNN-based model for differentiation between left and right-oriented images is presented. Multiple CNNs are trained and tested, with the highest performing being the VGG16 architecture which achieved an Accuracy of 0.99 (+/- 0.01), and an AUC of 0.98 (+/- 0.01). These results show that CNNs can be used to address the issue of orientation sensitivity by splitting the data in advance of being used in classification models.