HAND BONE AGE ESTIMATION USING ENERGY BASED SEGMENTATION?

Bones in our body are living tissue. They have their own blood vessels and are made of living cells, which help them to grow and to repair themselves. As well, proteins, minerals and vitamins make up the bone. We are born with about 300 soft bones. During childhood and adolescence, the cartilage grows and is slowly replaced by hard bone. Some of these bones later fuse together, so that the adult skeleton has 206 bones. Bone age is the degree of maturation of a child's bones. As a person grows from fetal life through childhood, puberty, and finishes growth as a young adult, the bones of the skeleton change in size and shape. These changes can be seen by x-ray. The "bone age" of a child is the average age at which children reach this stage of bone maturation. A child's current height and bone age can be used to predict adult height. Bone age x-rays helps to evaluate children for advanced or delayed growth and physical development. The most commonly used method is based on a single x-ray of the left hand, fingers, and wrist. A hand is easily x-rayed with minimal radiation and shows many bones in a single view. The bones in the x-ray are compared to the bones of a standard atlas, usually "Greulich and Pyle". In our proposed method bone age is determined by detailed morphological analyses of left hand x-ray, using discrete wavelet transformation or image transformation, energy based segmentation, Jacobi method, EMROI and CROI for feature extraction, ISEF edge detector and k-mean classifier.