Identifying Skeletal Maturity from X-rays using Deep Neural Networks

Skeletal maturity estimation is routinely evaluated by pediatrics and radiologists to assess growth and hormonal disorders. Methods integrated with regression techniques are incompatible with low-resolution digital samples and generate bias, when the evaluation protocols are implemented for feature assessment on coarse X-Ray hand images. This paper proposes a comparative analysis between two deep neural network architectures, with the base models such as Inception-ResNet-V2 and Xception-pre-trained networks. Based on 12,611 hand X-Ray images of RSNA Bone Age database, Inception-ResNet-V2 and Xception models have achieved R-Squared value of 0.935 and 0.942 respectively. Further, in the same order, the MAE accomplished by the two models are 12.583 and 13.299 respectively, when subjected to very few training instances with negligible chances of overfitting.