FDEA-Net: Enhancing X-Ray Fracture Detection via Detail-Boosted and Rotation-Aware Feature Encoding

X-ray imaging is the most widely used modality for fracture diagnosis in clinical practice due to its efficiency and accessibility. However, automated X-ray fracture detection faces two major challenges. First, fracture regions often contain subtle and low-contrast crack patterns, making it difficult for models to capture essential fine details. Second, fractures exhibit strong directional variability, while conventional detection frameworks have limited capacity to model rotation changes. To address these issues, we propose FDEA-Net, an enhanced detection framework tailored for fracture analysis. It integrates two lightweight improvement modules. The Fracture Detail Enhancer (FDE) strengthens high-frequency textures and fine-grained structural cues that are closely associated with fracture lines. The Rotation Aware Encoder (RAE) encodes rotation-sensitive representations, improving recognition under diverse fracture orientations. Experiments on a large-scale X-ray fracture dataset show clear performance gains, achieving an mAP50 of 0.742 and an F1-score of 0.738. These findings verify the effectiveness of combining detail enhancement with rotation-aware feature modeling. FDEA-Net provides an efficient and generalizable solution for reliable detection of subtle fractures in medical imaging.