OsteQuant -A comprehensive bone age and bone health estimation tool

OsteQuant -A comprehensive bone age and bone health estimation tool

Jyothisri Lokanadham
HTIC, IIT Madras, Chennai, India

Introduction: Bone age is being used by pediatricians since decades to assess skeletal maturity and development. Bone age is used in the diagnosis and management of growth and puberty related diseases which are of increasing prevalence, diagnosis of severity of malnutrition and severe stunting which has a nationwide prevalence of 35% on an average, age verification in sports, immigration, refugees, and minority related legal cases. The currently used methods of bone age estimation are time consuming, cumbersome and unreliable. The existing methods either require manual assessment or are expensive. Hence, we aim to design OsteQuant which is an automatic bone age assessment tool that is a standalone software which automatically analyses the X-Rays to provide the bone age results within minutes.

Methodology: The product development involves primary data collection of Hand and wrist radiographs from Indian population followed by training of a deep learning model, followed by refining the model to arrive at an acceptable accuracy. Various factors such as ethnicity, BMI, past medical history are taken into consideration while choosing the subjects. Subjects from 0 to 18 years are taken into consideration. Currently, ethical clearance has been obtained from Madras medical college and hospital and data collection up to 12 years has been collected. The images are being used to train a deep learning model, with an aimed accuracy of 95%.

Discussion: This application would also aid in reduction of the number of X-Rays required for bone age estimation, thus reducing X-Ray exposure. It would have a marked impact on age verification for legal purposes. Apart from improving the accuracy we also aim for the application to be customized to the health professional, thus being able to have an exclusive patient record of the results. The future scope of this application includes screening for Vitamin D deficiency disorders such as rickets, leukemic lines and osteoarthritis. Currently, ideation is going on in developing the tool into a comprehensive bone health estimation tool, that would be a one stop solution for the diagnosis of bone diseases.

Keywords: Bone Age, Automatic assessment