Abnormality Detection in Musculoskeletal Radiographs Using Capsule Network

To treat the diseases or injuries of the joints, bones, muscles, and spine in both adult and pediatric imaging the musculoskeletal radiographs bring a significant depth of expertise. Abnormality detection in the musculoskeletal study is backbreaking as more than 1.7 billion people are affected by musculoskeletal condition (BMU, 2017). Hence if we want to create enough opportunity to treat a maximum amount of patients, machine learning and deep learning can play a crucial role. CNN is an excellent deep learning method for image classification and other computer vision tasks. But CNN has exhibited some serious limitations when the images are rotated and deformed. Hence capsule network architecture is introduced in this paper for musculoskeletal radiographs abnormality detection and this capsnet architecture has shown very promising features that can help to vanquish the limitations of CNN. In addition, this capsule network has scored 10% higher kappa score than 169 layer densenet using less training data in the case of musculoskeletal radiographs abnormality detection. This feature of capsule network can help to use deep learning in such cases where an aggregate of a large amount of data is not possible. For image quality investigation, blind image spatial quality evaluator (BRISQUE) and naturalness image quality evaluator (NIQE) scores are measured and it is found that when the pixel size of the resized images are more close to the pixel size of the original images, we get a better approximation. Hence in the case of musculoskeletal radiographs abnormality detection, our method outperforms state-of-the-art method using a less amount of training data.