Segmenting radiographs of the hand and wrist.

The work presented in this paper concerns the development of computer-based techniques for the segmentation of hand-wrist radiographs and in particular those obtained for the TW2 method for the assessment of skeletal maturity (bone age). The segmentation method is based on the concept of regions and it consists of region growing and region merging stages. A bone extraction stage follows, which labels regions as either bone or background using heuristic rules based on the grey level properties of the scene. Finally, a technique is proposed for the segmentation of bone outlines which helps in identifying conjugated bones.

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