Adeshina Et Al.: Carpal Bones for Skeletal Maturity of Infants

We compare the utility of models of the structure of carpal bones in the hand for predicting skeletal maturity in infants (0 -7 yrs). Skeletal maturity assessment is important for diagnosing and monitoring growth disorders. Statistical models of bone shape and appearance have been shown to be useful for estimating skeletal maturity. In this work we investigate the effect of the choice of models of different carpal bones’ structure on prediction performance. By analysing the performance on a dataset of 294 digitized radiographs of normal infants we show that a simple texture based appearance model of the carpal region produces the best results. Our results show a mean absolute error of (0.42, 0.53) years, for female and male, from such a texture based model.