FROM INDIVIDUAL HAND BONE AGE ESTIMATES TO FULLY AUTOMATED AGE ESTIMATION VIA LEARNING-BASED INFORMATION FUSION

摘要

Increasingly important for both clinical and forensic medicine, radiological age estimation is performed by fusing independent bone age estimates from hand images. In this work, we show that the artificial separation into bone independent age estimates as used in established fusion techniques can be overcome. Thus, we treat aging as a global developmental process, by implicitly fusing developmental information from different bones in a dedicated regression algorithm. With 0.82±0.56 years absolute deviation from chronological age on a database of 132 3D MR hand images, the results of this novel automatic algorithm are inline with radiologists performing visual examinations.