AE-BoNet: A Deep Learning Method for Pediatric Bone Age Estimation using an Unsupervised Pre-Trained Model

Accurate bone age assessment is essential for determining the actual degree of development and indicating a disorder in growth. While clinical bone age assessment techniques are time-consuming and prone to inter/intra-observer variability, deep learning-based methods are used for automated bone age estimation.

The current study aimed to develop an unsupervised pre-training approach for automatic bone age estimation, addressing the challenge of limited labeled data and unique features of radiographic images of hand bones. Bone age estimation is complex and usually requires more labeling data. On the other hand, there is no model trained with hand radiographic images, reused for bone age estimation.

In this fundamental-applied research, the collection of Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) X-ray image collection is used to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed bone age estimation method. An autoencoder is trained to reconstruct the original hand radiography images. Then, a model based on the trained encoder produces the final estimation of bone age.

Experimental results on the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) X-ray image collection achieve a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 9.3 months, which is comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

This study presents an approach to estimating bone age on hand radiographs utilizing unsupervised pre-training with an autoencoder and also highlights the significance of autoencoders and unsupervised learning as efficient substitutes for conventional techniques.