Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 2 Faculty of Science and Technology, Islamic Science University of Malaysia, 71800, Nilai, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia
  • 3 Department of Mechatronics and Biomedical Engineering, Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Bandar Sungai Long, Cheras, 43000 Kajang, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
  • 4 Faculty of Biosciences and Medical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, 81310, Malaysia
Curr Med Imaging Rev, 2019;15(10):983-989.
PMID: 32008525 DOI: 10.2174/1573405615666190724101600

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Bone Age Assessment (BAA) refers to a clinical procedure that aims to identify a discrepancy between biological and chronological age of an individual by assessing the bone age growth. Currently, there are two main methods of executing BAA which are known as Greulich-Pyle and Tanner-Whitehouse techniques. Both techniques involve a manual and qualitative assessment of hand and wrist radiographs, resulting in intra and inter-operator variability accuracy and time-consuming. An automatic segmentation can be applied to the radiographs, providing the physician with more accurate delineation of the carpal bone and accurate quantitative analysis.

METHODS: In this study, we proposed an image feature extraction technique based on image segmentation with the fully convolutional neural network with eight stride pixel (FCN-8). A total of 290 radiographic images including both female and the male subject of age ranging from 0 to 18 were manually segmented and trained using FCN-8.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The results exhibit a high training accuracy value of 99.68% and a loss rate of 0.008619 for 50 epochs of training. The experiments compared 58 images against the gold standard ground truth images. The accuracy of our fully automated segmentation technique is 0.78 ± 0.06, 1.56 ±0.30 mm and 98.02% in terms of Dice Coefficient, Hausdorff Distance, and overall qualitative carpal recognition accuracy, respectively.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.