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Rib fracture detection in chest CT image based on a centernet network with heatmap pyramid structure

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Abstract

Chest rib fracture can be regarded as a kind of small objects to be detected with complex shape and large similarity to the surrounding background. Fatigue caused by work intensity is the main reason why radiologists’ detection efficiency and accuracy of rib fracture decrease over time. This work proposes an automatical detection method of rib fractures in chest CT image based on a centernet network with heatmap pyramid structure. Firstly, a hierarchical fusion hourglass network is constructed to perform feature extraction, and the multi-branch residual blocks and fusion strategy in it also play a positive role in improving the feature extraction ability. Secondly, a heatmap pyramid structure which can utilize multi-scale information is adopted to generate more accurate corner information. In addition, a non-local dual spatial attention module is designed to reduce the misclassification of corner and center points. Experimental results show that the proposed network achieves an accurate detection of rib fracture with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of more than 89%.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Shanxi Bethune Hospital for providing the data.

Funding

The Natural Science for Youth Foundation of China under Grant 62001321, Fundamental Research Program of Shanxi Province under Grants 20210302124265, and the Excellent Graduate Innovation Project of TYUST under Grant XCX212028.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic Information Engineering, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan, 030024, China

    Yipeng Su, Xiong Zhang, Hong Shangguan & Ranran Li

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  1. Yipeng Su
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  2. Xiong Zhang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by XZ, HS, YS and RL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by YS, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiong Zhang.

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Su, Y., Zhang, X., Shangguan, H. et al. Rib fracture detection in chest CT image based on a centernet network with heatmap pyramid structure. SIViP 17, 2343–2350 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02451-5

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