# Demographic-aware fine-grained visual recognition of pediatric wrist pathologies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12964/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Large Scale Fine-Grained Categorization and Domain-Specific Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06193/) (2018)
- [MetaFormer: A Unified Meta Framework for Fine-Grained Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02751/) (2022)
- [Combining Image Features and Patient Metadata to Enhance Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05239/) (2021)
- [Learning from the few: Fine-grained approach to pediatric wrist pathology recognition on a limited dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13542/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pediatric wrist pathologies recognition from radiographs is challenging because normal anatomy changes rapidly with development: evolving carpal ossification and open physes can resemble pathology, and maturation timing differs by sex. Image-only models trained on limited medical datasets therefore risk confusing normal developmental variation with true pathologies. We address this by framing pediatric wrist diagnosis as a fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) problem and proposing a demographic-aware hybrid convolution--transformer model that fuses X-rays with patient age and sex. To leverage demographic context while avoiding shortcut reliance, we introduce progressive metadata masking during training. We evaluate on a curated dataset that mirrors the typical constraints in real-world medical studies. The hybrid FGVR backbone outperforms traditional and modern CNNs, and demographic fusion yields additional gains. Finally, we show that initializing from a fine-grained pretraining source improves transfer relative to standard ImageNet initialization, suggesting that label granularity, even from non-medical data, can be a key driver of generalization for subtle radiographic findings.