Radiation-Preserving Selective Imaging for Pediatric Hip Dysplasia: A Cross-Modal Ultrasound-Xray Policy with Limited Labels

Abstract

We study an ultrasound-first, radiation-preserving policy for developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) that requests a radiograph only when needed. We (i) pretrain modality-specific encoders (ResNet-18) with SimSiam on a large unlabelled registry (37186 ultrasound; 19546 radiographs), (ii) freeze the backbones and fit small, measurement-faithful heads on DDH relevant landmarks and measurements (iii) calibrate a one sided conformal deferral rule on ultrasound predictions that provides finite sample coverage guarantees under exchangeability, using a held-out calibration set. Ultrasound heads predict Graf alpha, beta, and femoral head coverage; X-ray heads predict acetabular index (AI), center-edge (CE) angle and IHDI grade. On our held out labeled evaluation set, ultrasound measurement error is modest (e.g., alpha MAE ~= 9.7 degrees, coverage MAE ~= 14.0%), while radiographic probes achieve AI and CE MAEs of ~= 7.6 degrees and ~= 8.9 degrees, respectively. The calibrated US-only policy is explored across rule families (alpha-only; alpha OR coverage; alpha AND coverage), uncertainty inflation factors, and per-utility trade-offs using decision-curve analysis. Conservative settings yield high coverage with near-zero US-only rates; permissive settings (e.g., alpha OR coverage at larger deltas) achieve non-zero US-only throughput with expected coverage tradeoffs. The result is a simple, reproducible pipeline that turns limited labels into interpretable measurements and tunable selective imaging curves suitable for clinical handoff and future external validation.