YOLOv8-ResCBAM: YOLOv8 Based on An Effective Attention Module for Pediatric Wrist Fracture Detection

Wrist trauma and even fractures occur frequently in daily life, particularly among children who account for a significant proportion of fracture cases. Before performing surgery, surgeons often request patients to undergo X-ray imaging first, and prepare for the surgery based on the analysis of the X-ray images. With the development of neural networks, You Only Look Once (YOLO) series models have been widely used in fracture detection for Computer-Assisted Diagnosis, where the YOLOv8 model has obtained the satisfactory results. Applying the attention modules to neural networks is one of the effective methods to improve the model performance. This paper proposes YOLOv8-ResCBAM, which incorporates Convolutional Block Attention Module integrated with resblock (ResCBAM) into the original YOLOv8 network architecture. The experimental results on the GRAZPEDWRI-DX dataset demonstrate that the mean Average Precision calculated at Intersection over Union threshold of 0.5 (mAP 50) of the proposed model increased from 63.6% of the original YOLOv8 model to 65.8%, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/RuiyangJu/Fracture_Detection_Improved_YOLOv8.