PSO for Graph-Based Segmentation of Wrist Bones in Bone Age Assessment

Skeletal maturity is a reliable indicator of growth and skeletal bone age assessment (BAA) is used in the management and diagnosis of endocrine disorders. Bone age can be estimated from the left-hand wrist radiograph of the subject. The work presented in this paper proposes the development of an efficient technique for segmentation of hand-wrist radiographs and identifying the bones specially used as Regions of Interest (ROIs) for the bone age estimation process. The segmentation method is based on the concept of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and it consists of graph-based segmentation procedure. The system provides an option of either segmenting all the bones totally or segmenting only the specific ROIs under consideration. The system is validated with a data set of 100 images with 50 radiographs of female subjects and 50 of male subjects. The time taken for segmenting each bone is calculated and the results are discussed.