Three new publications

ACTA Radiology’s November 2013 issue is devoted to invited articles on pediatric radiology and features a review entitled “Bone age assessment: automated techniques coming of age?”.

It lists and discusses the requirements that such techniques must meet, and gives an overview of the validation studies performed on BoneXpert, addressing the three aspects: precision, accuracy, and validation through adult height prediction.

Pediatric Radiology reports a large validation study in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia.

ISRN Radiology presents a validation study on 6022 normal children from five large Chinese cities

Attainment of normal adult stature is one of the primary goals in the treatment of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH). The therapy consists of providing the patient with enough glucocorticoids, and finding the correct dosage poses a challenge because even slight overdoses will curb growth over time. Therefore bone age assessment is performed regularly, but the reading can be particularly challenging because bone age can be extremely advanced. The published study on 892 images from 100 patients showed that BoneXpert was able to analyse these image with sometimes very advanced bone age correctly, and that it had a better precision than manual rating.

The Chinese study derived “bone age minus age” reference curves for normal children studied in 2005 and found that these agree well with curves for Asian children from Los Angeles studied around the same time. Asian children attain full maturity 0.6 years earlier than Caucasian children from the same Los Angeles study.

All three new publications are listed in the publications page of this site.