A radius and ulna TW3 bone age assessment system

TitleA radius and ulna TW3 bone age assessment system
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2008
AuthorsTristán-Vega, A., and J. I. Arribas
JournalIEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
Volume55
Pagination1463-1476
ISSN00189294
KeywordsAge Determination by Skeleton, Aging, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Automated, Bone, Bone age assessment, Clustering algorithms, Computer-Assisted, Humans, Model selection, Neural networks, Pattern recognition, Radiographic Image Interpretation, Reproducibility of Results, Sensitivity and Specificity, Skeletal maturity, algorithm, article, artificial neural network, automation, bone age, bone maturation, childhood, instrumentation, radius, ulna
Abstract

An end-to-end system to automate the well-known Tanner - Whitehouse (TW3) clinical procedure to estimate the skeletal age in childhood is proposed. The system comprises the detailed analysis of the two most important bones in TW3: the radius and ulna wrist bones. First, a modified version of an adaptive clustering segmentation algorithm is presented to properly semi-automatically segment the contour of the bones. Second, up to 89 features are defined and extracted from bone contours and gray scale information inside the contour, followed by some well-founded feature selection mathematical criteria, based on the ideas of maximizing the classes' separability. Third, bone age is estimated with the help of a Generalized Softmax Perceptron (GSP) neural network (NN) that, after supervised learning and optimal complexity estimation via the application of the recently developed Posterior Probability Model Selection (PPMS) algorithm, is able to accurately predict the different development stages in both radius and ulna from which and with the help of the TW3 methodology, we are able to conveniently score and estimate the bone age of a patient in years, in what can be understood as a multiple-class (multiple stages) pattern recognition approach with posterior probability estimation. Finally, numerical results are presented to evaluate the system performance in predicting the bone stages and the final patient bone age over a private hand image database, with the help of the pediatricians and the radiologists expert diagnoses. © 2006 IEEE.

URLhttp://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-42249094547&partnerID=40&md5=2cecfea5f75a61b048611f2391b00aed
DOI10.1109/TBME.2008.918554