Efficient Bone Age Assessment Methods

The Bone age assessment (BAA) is used to estimate the skeletal maturity of children. Performing bone age assessment is an important path of the diagnostic and management pathway in children with a variety of growth and endocrine disorder. Bone age assessment methods are popular to estimate the growth rate of children. BAA is used to find hormone problems such as thyroid, diabetes, obesity and also finds genetic disorders such as deletion of genes, chromosome abnormalities. The growth problem is determined by the difference between a skeletal bone age and chronological age (The age from the birth). But such differences are not to always mean there is a skeletal maturity problem, because sometimes healthy kids can have the differences between bone ages and the birth age. The Appearances of the carpal bones, metacarpal bones, phalanges, radius and ulna of left hand wrist is used to calculate the bone age efficiently. This paper presents an efficient survey on Bone Age Assessment methods. The various methods are used to estimate bone age such as Epiphysis/Metaphysis Region of Interest (EMROI), Greulich and Pyle (GP), Tanner and Whitehouse (TW2, TW3), Eklof and Ringertz (ER3, ER5), Hausdroff distance and Histogram based BAA. This paper aims that to define the best method for estimating bone age based on comparisons of these four methods with their accuracy and efficiency.