Aims and objectives
Radiographic bone age assessment was commonly used in the evaluation of pediatric endocrinology problems,
children’s growth and genetic disorders[1],in which the patient's chronologicage was comparedwith their level of skeletal maturity based on a standardizedreference.
At present,
either the atlas matching method of Greulich and Pyle [2–4] or the scoring assigning method of Tanner–Whitehouse (TW) [5,6] are the typical approaches used for bone age assessment in clinics,
by comparing a radiograph of the handand wrist to an age-based atlas,
or determining age based onscoring specific radiographic...
Methods and materials
The left-hand radiographs of 5000 children with suspected metabolic disorders such as pubertas praecox were acquired from Wuxi Children’s Hospital(Fig.1).
From the total cases above,
1224 were randomly selected as training set (2~16years old: male 406,
female 818).
Another 101 patients were acquired prospectively and were continuouslyused as a validation set (2~16 years old: male 27,
female 74).
The scoring assignment method for determining bone age involves detailed analyses of the degree of growth of key epiphysis(Fig.2). So,
in the study several professional pediatric radiologists...
Results
The test results showed that when the error range was in ±1.0 and ±0.7 ages respectively,
the accuracy of the validation set was 92.6% and 81.5% for males(Table.1)and 97.3% and 87.8% for females(Table.2).
The mean absolute error between the doctors and AI model was 0.36 and 0.30 years for males and females,
respectively.
Conclusion
Although it was only trained and tested on relatively small samples,
the bone age assessment model based on deep learning method in this study had shown high accuracy within small bias.
With the increment of the sample size,
it will be possible that the automated bone age assessment emerge in the clinical application.
References
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Poznanski AK,
Hernandez RJ,
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(1978) Carpal length in children–a useful measurement in the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and some congenital malformation syndromes.
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2.
Greulich WW,
Pyle SI.
(1959) Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of Hand and Wrist.
Stanford,
Stanford University Press.
3.
Pyle SI,
Reed RB,
Stuart HC.
( 1959) Patterns of skeletal development in the hand.
Pediatrics.
4: 886–903.
4.
Gilli G.
( 1996)The assessment of skeletal maturation.
Horm Res.
5 (suppl 2):49–52.
5.Tanner JM,Whitehouse RH,Cameron N...