Enhancing Wrist Abnormality Detection with YOLO: Analysis of State-of-the-art Single-stage Detection Models

Diagnosing and treating abnormalities in the wrist, specifically distal radius, and ulna fractures, is a crucial concern among children, adolescents, and young adults, with a higher incidence rate during puberty. However, the scarcity of radiologists and the lack of specialized training among medical professionals pose a significant risk to patient care. This problem is further exacerbated by the rising number of imaging studies and limited access to specialist reporting in certain regions. This highlights the need for innovative solutions to improve the diagnosis and treatment of wrist abnormalities. Automated wrist fracture detection using object detection has shown potential, but current studies mainly use two-stage detection methods with limited evidence for single-stage effectiveness. This study employs state-of-the-art single-stage deep neural network-based detection models YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 to detect wrist abnormalities. Through extensive experimentation, we found that these YOLO models outperform the commonly used two-stage detection algorithm, Faster R-CNN, in bone fracture detection. Additionally, compound-scaled variants of each YOLO model were compared, with YOLOv8x demonstrating a fracture detection mean average precision (mAP) of 0.95 and an overall mAP of 0.77 on the GRAZPEDWRI-DX pediatric wrist dataset, highlighting the potential of single-stage models for enhancing pediatric wrist imaging.