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Published on: January 29, 2018
Automatic determination of Greulich and Pyle bone age in healthy Dutch children
Rick R van Rijn1, Maarten H Lequin, Hans Henrik Thodberg
1Department of Radiology, Academic Medical Center Amsterdam, Amsterdam Zuid-Oost, The Netherlands. r.r.vanrijn@amc.uva.nl
Background:
Bone age (BA) assessment is a routine procedure in paediatric radiology, for which the Greulich and Pyle (GP) atlas is mostly used. There is rater variability, but the advent of automatic BA determination eliminates this.
Objective:
To validate the BoneXpert method for automatic determination of skeletal maturity of healthy children against manual GP BA ratings.
Materials And Methods:
Two observers determined GP BA with knowledge of the chronological age (CA). A total of 226 boys with a BA of 3-17 years and 179 girls with a BA of 3-15 years were included in the study. BoneXpert's estimate of GP BA was calibrated to agree on average with the manual ratings based on several studies, including the present study.
Results:
Seven subjects showed a deviation between manual and automatic BA in excess of 1.9 years. They were re-rated blindly by two raters. After correcting these seven ratings, the root mean square error between manual and automatic rating in the 405 subjects was 0.71 years (range 0.66-0.76 years, 95% CI). BoneXpert's GP BA is on average 0.28 and 0.20 years behind the CA for boys and girls, respectively.
Conclusion:
BoneXpert is a robust method for automatic determination of BA.
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