Hand Pose Estimation for Pediatric Bone Age Assessment

We present a new experimental framework for the task of Bone Age Assessment (BAA) based on a local analysis of anatomical Regions Of Interest (ROIs) of hand radiographs. For this purpose, we introduce the Radiological Hand Pose Estimation (RHPE) Dataset, composed of 6,288 hand radiographs from a population that is different from the currently available BAA datasets. We provide Bone Age groundtruths annotated by two expert radiologists as well as bounding boxes and keypoints denoting anatomical ROIs annotated by multiple trained subjects. In addition to RHPE, we provide bounding boxes and ROIs annotations for the publicly available BAA dataset by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) [9]. We propose a new experimental framework with hand detection and hand pose estimation as new tasks to extract local information for BAA methods. Thanks to its fine-grained and precisely localized annotations, our dataset will allow to exploit local information to push forward automated BAA algorithms. Additionally, we conduct experiments with state-of-the-art methods in each of the new tasks. Our proposed model, named BoNet, leverages local information and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in BAA. We provide the RHPE dataset with the corresponding annotations, as well as the trained models, the source code for BoNet and the additional annotations created for the RSNA dataset.