Diagnosis of nasal bone fractures on plain radiographs via convolutional neural networks

This study aimed to assess the performance of deep learning (DL) algorithms in the diagnosis of nasal bone fractures on radiographs and compare it with that of experienced radiologists. In this retrospective study, 6713 patients whose nasal radiographs were examined for suspected nasal bone fractures between January 2009 and October 2020 were assessed. Our dataset was randomly split into training (n = 4325), validation (n = 481), and internal test (n = 1250) sets; a separate external dataset (n = 102) was used. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity of the DL algorithm and the two radiologists were compared. The AUCs of the DL algorithm for the internal and external test sets were 0.85 (95% CI, 0.83–0.86) and 0.86 (95% CI, 0.78–0.93), respectively, and those of the two radiologists for the external test set were 0.80 (95% CI, 0.73–0.87) and 0.75 (95% CI, 0.68–0.82). The DL algorithm therefore significantly exceeded radiologist 2 ( P = 0.021) but did not significantly differ from radiologist 1 ( P = 0.142). The sensitivity and specificity of the DL algorithm were 83.1% (95% CI, 71.2–93.2%) and 83.7% (95% CI, 69.8–93.0%), respectively. Our DL algorithm performs comparably to experienced radiologists in diagnosing nasal bone fractures on radiographs.