LERA: Lower Extremity Radiographs

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), which encompass a wide variety of bone, soft tissue, and joint abnormalities, are a major healthcare challenge around the world. MSDs are typically diagnosed using radiographs; however, variations in diagnostic interpretation quality can often lead to diagnostic errors. This problem is often compounded by a lack of available tools to triage large volumes of unread examinations, which can result in numerous adverse downstream effects related to delay of diagnosis and treatment.The recent revolution in deep learning techniques for image analysis suggests that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can serve as an effective tool for computer-aided detection of radiograph abnormalities. To aid computational models in accurately identifying diverse abnormalities in highly-variable radiographs of multiple body parts, we are releasing LERA (Lower Extremity RAdiographs). This dataset was used as the held-out test set in our recent study, which found that a single pre-trained CNN was effective in performing generalized abnormality detection in lower extremities [citation after publication].