Artificial intelligence to detect the femoral intertrochanteric fracture: The arrival of the intelligent-medicine era

Objective: To explore a new artificial intelligence (AI)-aided method to assist the clinical diagnosis of femoral intertrochanteric fracture (FIF), and further compare the performance with human level to confirm the effect and feasibility of the AI algorithm.Methods: 700 X-rays of FIF were collected and labeled by two senior orthopedic physicians to set up the database, 643 for the training database and 57 for the test database. A Faster-RCNN algorithm was applied to be trained and detect the FIF on X-rays. The performance of the AI algorithm such as accuracy, sensitivity, miss diagnosis rate, specificity, misdiagnosis rate, and time consumption was calculated and compared with that of orthopedic attending physicians.Results: Compared with orthopedic attending physicians, the Faster-RCNN algorithm performed better in accuracy (0.88 vs. 0.84 ± 0.04), specificity (0.87 vs. 0.71 ± 0.08), misdiagnosis rate (0.13 vs. 0.29 ± 0.08), and time consumption (5 min vs. 18.20 ± 1.92 min). As for the sensitivity and missed diagnosis rate, there was no statistical difference between the AI and orthopedic attending physicians (0.89 vs. 0.87 ± 0.03 and 0.11 vs. 0.13 ± 0.03).Conclusion: The AI diagnostic algorithm is an available and effective method for the clinical diagnosis of FIF. It could serve as a satisfying clinical assistant for orthopedic physicians.