Automatic skeletal bone age assessment by integrating EMROI and CROI processing

In this work we propose a fully automatic system for bone age evaluation, according to the Tanner and Whitehouse method (TW2), based on the integration between EMROI and CROI analysis, which ensures accurate bone age assessment for the entire age range (0-10). For both approaches novel segmentation techniques will be proposed. In detail, for the CROI analysis the bones extraction has been carried out by integrating anatomical knowledge of the hand and trigonometric concepts, whereas the TW2 stage assignment is implemented by combining the active contour models (ACM) and derivative difference of Gaussian (DrDoG) filter. For the EMROI analysis, image processing techniques and geometrical features analysis, based on difference of Gaussian (DoG), are proposed. The experimental results were conducted on a set of 30 X-Rays, reaching performances of about 87%. The performances of the proposed method are affected by the detection and extraction of the Trapezium and Trapezoid (50%). Without considering such bones the success rate raises to 91%. © 2009 IEEE