—Bone fracture is one of the most widespread musculoskeletal traumas in the world that must be properly diagnosed quickly to avoid delayed therapy, long-term disability and high expenditures on healthcare. Despite the fact that the traditional analysis of medical images including X-ray, computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is still the standard of clinical practice, manual analysis is commonly influenced by the variability of the observer, the hidden fracture patterns, and the growing radiologist workload. The latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and in specific, deep learning and the transformer models have greatly advanced the process of automated fracture recognition and classification. Nevertheless, the current literature is also divided, with a preponderance of studies on particular anatomical regions, single deep-learning models, or single imaging modalities, and little work has been done to analyze the emerging AI methods, explainable AI, multimodal learning, and clinical translation. The survey gives a broad overview of the latest AI methods of bone fracture detection by medical imaging. The paper systematically lists machine learning, deep learning, object detection, segmentation, transformer-based, hybrid, and explainable AI techniques, and comparatively examines publicly available benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, imaging modalities, and representative publications published between 2024 and 2026. Moreover, the existing research gaps, unresolved questions, and prospective directions, such as the foundation models, federated learning, multimodal AI, and credible clinical decision support, are touched upon to make the process of creating effective and clinically implementable intelligent fracture diagnosis systems possible. Keywords—Bone fracture recognition, Artificial intelligence, Deep learning, Medical imaging, X-ray analysis, Vision Transformer, Explainable AI, Clinical decision support.

Bone fracture recognition, Artificial intelligence, Deep learning, Medical imaging, X-ray analysis, Vision Transformer, Explainable AI, Clinical decision support