Chronological age assessment based on wrist radiograph processing – Some novel approaches

Abstract

Assessing the age of an individual via bones serves as a technique in determination of individual skills. In this work, the assessment of chronological age for varying age groups of individuals is carried out using left hand wrist radiographs. The datasets employed for experimentation are preprocessed and extracted using an automated segmentation technique using bit plane level data of radiograph images. The flow of proposed work is comprised of three stages, in stage 1 preprocessing is carried out, classification of preprocessed radiographs are classified into male and female samples using convolution kernels based deep neural net. Further, distance features are extracted from the origin of carpal bones to tip of extracted phalangeal regions in the classified outcomes from stage 2 using imtool image analyzer. Finally, classification of distance features is performed using Support Vector Machines with Gaussian Kernel (SVM-GK) to label the radiographs into ages from 1 to 17. The experimentation is performed on the datasets of Pediatric Bone Age challenge of Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) of about 12000 images of 1–17 year age groups. The convergence between actual and clinically validated chronological age is also tested with Gaussian process regression model (GPRM) along with SVM. A very minimal loss of about 4.7% is occurred during classification using deep neural network. The classification accuracy is found to be 76.8% and 88.1% and 0.75 and 1.41 RMSE with respect to GPRM and SVM-GK.