Automatic method for bone age assessment based on combined method

Abstract

Bone age assessment (BAA) is a method of evaluating the level of skeletal maturation in children. Generally, it is applied manually by comparing an X-ray of a left hand-wrist with a standard samples as atlas in the clinical procedure. The manual methods are prone to variability of observation, time consuming and limited to objective decisions. These are big motivations for automatic method for bone age assessment. This study aims to develop an automated method for BAA based on combined method. This method tries to overcome the problems of conducting BAA in manual methods. A survey questionnaire is used as the part of research methodology to identify the BAA method used by radiologists and to extract the factors that effect on determination of bone age in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC).