Automated bone age assessment: motivation, taxonomies, and challenges

Bone age assessment (BAA) of unknown people is one of the most important topics in clinical procedure for evaluation of biological maturity of children. BAA is performed usually by comparing an X-ray of left hand wrist with an atlas of known sample bones. Recently, BAA has gained remarkable ground from academia and medicine. Manual methods of BAA are time-consuming and prone to observer variability. This is a motivation for developing automated methods of BAA. However, there is considerable research on the automated assessment, much of which are still in the experimental stage. This survey provides taxonomy of automated BAA approaches and discusses the challenges. Finally, we present suggestions for future research.