Artificial Intelligence in Fracture Detection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Patients with fractures are a common emergency presentation and may be misdiagnosed at radiologic imaging. An increasing number of studies apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to fracture detection as an adjunct to clinician diagnosis. To perform a systematic review and meta-analysis comparing the diagnostic performance in fracture detection between AI and clinicians in peer-reviewed publications and the gray literature (ie, articles published on preprint repositories). A search of multiple electronic databases between January 2018 and July 2020 (updated June 2021) was performed that included any primary research studies that developed and/or validated AI for the purposes of fracture detection at any imaging modality and excluded studies that evaluated image segmentation algorithms. Meta-analysis with a hierarchical model to calculate pooled sensitivity and specificity was used.