Comparing Stacking Ensemble Techniques to Improve Musculoskeletal Fracture Image Classification

Abstract

Bone fractures are among the main reasons for emergency room admittance and require a rapid response from doctors. Bone fractures can be severe and can lead to permanent disability if not treated correctly and rapidly. Using X-ray imaging in the emergency room to detect fractures is a challenging task that requires an experienced radiologist, a specialist who is not always available. The availability of an automatic tool for image classification can provide a second opinion for doctors operating in the emergency room and reduce the error rate in diagnosis. This study aims to increase the existing state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks’ performance by using various ensemble techniques. In this approach, different CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) are used to classify the images; rather than choosing the best one, a stacking ensemble provides a more reliable and robust classifier. The ensemble model outperforms the results of individual CNNs by an average of 10%.

Keywords

• deep learning
• image classification
• stacking
• ensemble learning
• convolutional neural networks
• transfer learning