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Objectives: To develop a deep learning methodology that distinguishes early from late stages of avascular necrosis of the hip (AVN) to determine treatment decisions. Methods: Three convolutional neural networks (CNNs) VGG-16, Inception ResnetV2, InceptionV3 were trained with transfer learning (ImageNet) and finetuned with a retrospectively collected cohort of (n = 104) MRI examinations of AVN patients, to differentiate between early (ARCO 1–2) and late (ARCO 3–4) stages. A consensus CNN ensemble decision was recorded as the agreement of at least two CNNs. CNN and ensemble performance was benchmarked on an independent cohort of 49 patients from another country and was compared to the performance of two MSK radiologists. CNN performance was expressed with areas under the curve (AUC), the respective 95% confidence intervals (CIs) and precision, and recall and f1-scores. AUCs were compared with DeLong's test. Results: On internal testing, Inception-ResnetV2 achieved the highest individual performance with an AUC of 99.7% (95%CI 99–100%), followed by InceptionV3 and VGG-16 with AUCs of 99.3% (95%CI 98.4–100%) and 97.3% (95%CI 95.5–99.2%) respectively. The CNN ensemble the same AUCs Inception ResnetV2. On external validation, model performance dropped with VGG-16 achieving the highest individual AUC of 78.9% (95%CI 51.6–79.6%) The best external performance was achieved by the model ensemble with an AUC of 85.5% (95%CI 72.2–93.9%). No significant difference was found between the CNN ensemble and expert MSK radiologists (p = 0.22 and 0.092 respectively). Conclusion: An externally validated CNN ensemble accurately distinguishes between the early and late stages of AVN and has comparable performance to expert MSK radiologists. Clinical relevance statement: This paper introduces the use of deep learning for the differentiation between early and late avascular necrosis of the hip, assisting in a complex clinical decision that can determine the choice between conservative and surgical treatment. Key Points: • A convolutional neural network ensemble achieved excellent performance in distinguishing between early and late avascular necrosis. • The performance of the deep learning method was similar to the performance of expert readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential diagnosis between avascular necrosis (AVN) and transient osteoporosis of the hip (TOH) can be complicated even for experienced MSK radiologists. Our study attempted to use MR images in order to develop a deep learning methodology with the use of transfer learning and a convolutional neural network (CNN) ensemble, for the accurate differentiation between the two diseases. An augmented dataset of 210 hips with TOH and 210 hips with AVN was used to finetune three ImageNet-trained CNNs (VGG-16, InceptionResNetV2, and InceptionV3). An ensemble decision was reached in a hard-voting manner by selecting the outcome voted by at least two of the CNNs. Inception-ResNet-V2 achieved the highest AUC (97.62%) similar to the model ensemble, followed by InceptionV3 (AUC of 96.82%) and VGG-16 (AUC 96.03%). Precision for the diagnosis of AVN and recall for the detection of TOH were higher in the model ensemble compared to Inception-ResNet-V2. Ensemble performance was significantly higher than that of an MSK radiologist and a fellow (P < 0.001). Deep learning was highly successful in distinguishing TOH from AVN, with a potential to aid treatment decisions and lead to the avoidance of unnecessary surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]