A ROI Extraction Method for Wrist Imaging Applied in Smart Bone-Age Assessment System

Bone Age (BA) is reckoned to be closely associated with the growth and development of teenagers, whose assessment highly depends on the accurate extraction of the reference bone from the carpal bone. Being uncertain in its proportion and irregular in its shape, wrong judgment and poor average extraction accuracy of the reference bone will no doubt lower the accuracy of Bone Age Assessment (BAA). In recent years, machine learning and data mining are widely embraced in smart healthcare systems. Using these two instruments, this article aims to tackle the aforementioned problems by proposing a Region of Interest (ROI) extraction method for wrist X-ray images based on optimized YOLO model. The method combines Deformable convolution-focus (Dc-focus), Coordinate attention (Ca) module, Feature level expansion, and Efficient Intersection over Union (EIoU) loss all together as YOLO-DCFE. With the improvement, the model can better extract the features of irregular reference bone and reduce the potential misdiscrimination between the reference bone and other similarly shaped reference bones, improving the detection accuracy. We select 10041 images taken by professional medical cameras as the dataset to test the performance of YOLO-DCFE. Statistics show the advantages of YOLO-DCFE in detection speed and high accuracy. The detection accuracy of all ROIs is 99.8%, which is higher than other models. Meanwhile, YOLO-DCFE is the fastest of all comparison models, with the Frames Per Second (FPS) reaching 16.