Fractured Elbow Classification Using Hand-Crafted and Deep Feature Fusion and Selection Based on Whale Optimization Approach

The fracture of the elbow is common in human beings. The complex structure of the elbow, including its irregular shape, border, etc., makes it difficult to correctly recognize elbow fractures. To address such challenges, a method is proposed in this work that consists of two phases. In Phase I, pre-processing is performed, in which images are converted into RGB. In Phase II, pre-trained convolutional models Darknet-53 and Xception are used for deep feature extraction. The handcrafted features, such as the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and local binary pattern (LBP), are also extracted from the input images. A principal component analysis (PCA) is used for best feature selection and is serially merged into a single-feature vector having the length of N×2125. Furthermore, informative features N×1049 are selected out of N×2125 features using the whale optimization approach (WOA) and supplied to SVM, KNN, and wide neural network (WNN) classifiers. The proposed method’s performance is evaluated on 16,984 elbow X-ray radiographs that are taken from the publicly available musculoskeletal radiology (MURA) dataset. The proposed technique provides 97.1% accuracy and a kappa score of 0.943% for the classification of elbow fractures. The obtained results are compared to the most recently published approaches on the same benchmark datasets.