Abstract
Background: Bone age (BA) assessment is a routine procedure in paediatric radiology, for which the Greulich and Pyle (GP) atlas is mostly used. There is rater variability, but the advent of automatic BA determination eliminates this. Objective: To validate the BoneXpert method for automatic determination of skeletal maturity of healthy children against manual GP BA ratings. Materials and methods: Two observers determined GP BA with knowledge of the chronological age (CA). A total of 226 boys with a BA of 3-17 years and 179 girls with a BA of 3-15 years were included in the study. BoneXpert's estimate of GP BA was calibrated to agree on average with the manual ratings based on several studies, including the present study. Results: Seven subjects showed a deviation between manual and automatic BA in excess of 1.9 years. They were re-rated blindly by two raters. After correcting these seven ratings, the root mean square error between manual and automatic rating in the 405 subjects was 0.71 years (range 0.66-0.76 years, 95% CI). BoneXpert's GP BA is on average 0.28 and 0.20 years behind the CA for boys and girls, respectively. Conclusion: BoneXpert is a robust method for automatic determination of BA.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 591-597 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Pediatric Radiology |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2009 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Automated recognition
- Bone age
- Radiography
- Skeleton