Implementation of a TW3-Based Bone Age Assessment Cloud Service System with Automatic Phalanx Segmentation

• Main Authors: Yang, You-Cyuan, 楊又權
• Other Authors: Jong, Tai-Lang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/88166872311024833592

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 電機工程學系 === 102 === In the pediatric applications, bone age assessment is used to evaluate the growth of children. From the bone age, we can not only know that if there is growth retardation in the children, but also predict the adult height of the children. Tanner and Whitehouse III (TW3) method is a method of assessing skeletal age of children. In general, TW3 method has a benefit in reducing subjective factors. However, it will be quite time-consuming because there are twenty bone regions on left-hand X-ray image needed to examine against standard radiograms of each growth stage. In recent years, with the development of computer network, some web-based TW3 scoring systems could be found in the Internet. Although it reduced use of papers when scoring bone age by using TW3 method, evaluators or physicians still need to spend a lot of time scoring their data. In order to simplify the procedure of TW3 method, it is beneficial to develop a pre-processing algorithm to partition the hand radiograms into regions. Previous studies have reported how to separate the phalanx on radiograms from the background and soft tissue. However, if the fingers on the radiograms overlapped, they could not do the job rightly. In this study, we propose a phalanx segmentation algorithm to extract phalanx ROI fast and precisely. Furthermore, when dealing with the case of radiograms with fingers overlapped, our algorithm works as good as the usual. Moreover, the cloud computing becomes popular by its large data storage property. Thus, a bone age assessment cloud computing system, which is based on our phalanx segmentation algorithm and TW3 method, was built. We hope the physicians or radiologists can evaluate the bone age by TW3 method more efficient with the help of this system.