Pediatric Bone Age Assessment Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Skeletal bone age assessment is a common clinical practice to diagnose endocrine and metabolic disorders in child development. In this paper, we describe a fully automated deep learning approach to the problem of bone age assessment using data from the 2017 Pediatric Bone Age Challenge organized by the Radiological Society of North America. The dataset for this competition is consisted of 12.6k radiological images. Each radiograph in this dataset is an image of a left hand labeled by the bone age and the sex of a patient. Our approach utilizes several deep neural network architectures trained end-to-end. We use images of whole hands as well as specific parts of a hand for both training and inference. This approach allows us to measure the importance of specific hand bones for the automated bone age analysis. We further evaluate performance of the method in the context of skeletal development stages. Our approach outperforms other common methods for bone age assessment.