Abstract:
Objective Construct and validate a deep learning-based bone age prediction model for children living in both plain and highland regions.
Methods A model named “Ethnicity Vision Gender-Bone Age Net (EVG-BANet)” was trained using three datasets, including the Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) dataset training set(
n=12611), validation set (
n=1425), test set (
n=200), the Radiological Hand Pose Estimation (RHPE) datasettraining set (
n=5491), validation set (
n=713), test set (
n=79) and a self-established datasettraining set (
n=825), test set (
n=351) , and validated using an external test set. Self-established dataset retrospectively recruited 1176 left-hand DR images of children from Peking Union Medical College Hospital (
n=745, all were Han) and Tibet Autonomous Region People’s Hospital (
n=431, Han were 114, Tibetan were 317). External test set included images from Peoples’s Hospital of Nagqu (
n=256, all were Tibetan). Mean absolute difference (MAD) and accuracy within 1 year were used as indicators.
Results EVG-BANet exhibited MAD of 0.34 and 0.52 years in RSNA and RHPE test sets respectively. In the self-established test set, the model achieved MAD of 0.47 years (95% CI: 0.43-0.50) with accuracy within 1 year of 97.72% (95% CI: 95.56-99.01%). For the external test set, MAD was 0.53 years (95% CI: 0.48-0.58), with accuracy within 1 year of 89.45% (95% CI: 85.03-92.93).
Conclusion EVG-BANet demonstrated high accuracy and can be applied in children living in both plain and highland.