Skeletal bone age prediction based on a deep residual network with spatial transformer

Abstract

Objective: Bone age prediction can be performed by medical experts manually assessment of X-ray images of the hand bone. In practice, the workload is huge, resource consumption is large, measurement takes a long time, and it is easily influenced by human factors. As such, manual estimation of bone age takes a long time and the results fluctuate greatly depending on the proficiency of the radiologist.

Methods: The left-hand X-ray image data was identified and pre-processed. X-ray image analysis method using on deep neural network was used to automatically extract the key features of the left-hand joint bone age, and evaluation performance of the model was implemented.

Results: In this paper, the deep learning method can be used to obtain the X-ray bone image features, and the convolutional neural network is used to automatically assess the age of bone. The feature region extraction method based on deep learning can extract feature information with superior performance compared to the traditional image analysis technique. Based on the residual network (ResNet) model in the deep learning algorithm, the average absolute error of the age of bones detected by the bone age assessment model is 0.455 better than traditional methods and only end-to-end deep learning methods. When the learning rate is greater than 0.0005, the MAE of Inception Resnet v2 model is higher than most models. Accuracy of bone age prediction is as high as 97.6%.

Conclusion: In comparison with the traditional machine learning feature extraction technique, the convolutional neural network based on feature extraction has better performance in the bone age regression model, and further improves the accuracy of image-based age of bone assessment.

Keywords: Automatic bone age prediction; Convolutional neural network; Deep learning; Image processing; X-ray bone image.