Lichong Liang

Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is one of the most common orthopedic disorders in infants and young children. Accurate identification and localization of anatomical landmarks are prerequisites for the diagnosis of DDH. In recent years, various works have employed deep learning algorithms on radiography images for DDH diagnosis. However, none of these works have considered the incorporation of multimodal information. The pelvis exhibits distinct structures at different developmental stages, and there are also gender-based differences. In light of this, this study proposes a method to enhance the performance of deep learning models in diagnosing DDH by incorporating age and gender information into the channels. The study utilizes YOLO5 to construct a deep learning network for detecting hip joint landmarks. Moreover, a comprehensive dataset of 7750 pelvic X-ray images is established, covering ages from 4 months to 16 years and encompassing various conditions, such as deformities and post-operative cases, which authentically capture the temporal diversity and pathological complexities of DDH. Experimental results show that the YOLO5 model with integrated multimodal information achieves a mAP_0.5–0.95 of 83.1% and a diagnostic accuracy of 86.7% in test dataset. The F1 scores for diagnosing cases of normal (NM), suspected dislocation (SD), mild dislocation (MD), and heavily dislocation (HD) are 90.9%, 79.8%, 63.5%, and 97.4%, respectively. Furthermore, experiments conducted on datasets of different sizes and networks of different sizes demonstrate the beneficial impact of multimodal information in improving the effectiveness of deep learning in diagnosing DDH.