# Leveraging Auxiliary Classification for Rib Fracture Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09283 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09283/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [3D MRI brain tumor segmentation using autoencoder regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11654/) (2018)
- [An application of cascaded 3D fully convolutional networks for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05431/) (2018)
- [Deep Rib Fracture Instance Segmentation and Classification from CT on the RibFrac Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09372/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Thoracic trauma often results in rib fractures, which demand swift and accurate diagnosis for effective treatment. However, detecting these fractures on rib CT scans poses considerable challenges, involving the analysis of many image slices in sequence. Despite notable advancements in algorithms for automated fracture segmentation, the persisting challenges stem from the diverse shapes and sizes of these fractures. To address these issues, this study introduces a sophisticated deep-learning model with an auxiliary classification task designed to enhance the accuracy of rib fracture segmentation. The auxiliary classification task is crucial in distinguishing between fractured ribs and negative regions, encompassing non-fractured ribs and surrounding tissues, from the patches obtained from CT scans. By leveraging this auxiliary task, the model aims to improve feature representation at the bottleneck layer by highlighting the regions of interest. Experimental results on the RibFrac dataset demonstrate significant improvement in segmentation performance.