Carpal-bone feature extraction analysis in skeletal age assessment based on deformable model

Abstract

Skeletal age assessment is one of the important applications of hand radiography in the area of pediatric radiology. Features analysis of the carpal bones can reveal the important information for skeletal age assessment. The present work in this paper faces the problem of the detection of carpal-bone features from its radio-image. A novel and effective segmentation technique is presented in this work with carpal bone image for skeletal age estimation. Carpal bone segmentation is a critical operation of the automatic skeletal age assessment system. This method consists of three procedures. First, the original carpal bone image is preprocessed via anisotropic diffusion. Then, the carpal bone image is segmented by GVF-Snake model. Third, experiments are carried out on images of carpal bone. The results are very promising. In particular the method is able to extract overlapping carpal bones.