PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | March 21, 2007
Proc. SPIE. 6516, Medical Imaging 2007: PACS and Imaging Informatics
KEYWORDS: Visual analytics, Computer aided diagnosis and therapy, Visualization, Databases, Image processing, Feature extraction, Bone, Java, Computer aided design, Data analysis
The most commonly used method for bone age assessment in clinical practice is the book atlas matching method
developed by Greulich and Pyle in the 1950s. Due to changes in both population diversity and nutrition in the United
States, this atlas may no longer be a good reference. An updated data set becomes crucial to improve the bone age
assessment process. Therefore, a digital hand atlas was built with 1,100 children hand images, along with patient
information and radiologists' readings, of normal Caucasian (CAU), African American (BLK), Hispanic (HIS), and
Asian (ASI) males (M) and females (F) with ages ranging from 0 - 18 years. This data was collected from Childrens'
Hospital Los Angeles. A computer-aided-diagnosis (CAD) method has been developed based on features extracted from
phalangeal regions of interest (ROIs) and carpal bone ROIs from this digital hand atlas. Using the data collected along
with the Greulich and Pyle Atlas-based readings and CAD results, this paper addresses this question: "Do different
ethnicities and gender have different bone growth patterns?" To help with data analysis, a novel web-based visualization
tool was developed to demonstrate bone growth diversity amongst differing gender and ethnic groups using data
collected from the Digital Atlas. The application effectively demonstrates a discrepancy of bone growth pattern amongst
different populations based on race and gender. It also has the capability of helping a radiologist determine the
normality of skeletal development of a particular patient by visualizing his or her chronological age, radiologist reading,
and CAD assessed bone age relative to the accuracy of the P&G method.
