Model-based segmentation of hand radiographs

Bn important procedure in pediatrics is to determine the skeletal maturity of a patient from radiographs of the hand. There is great interest in the automation of this tedious and time-consuming task. We present a new method for the segmentation of the bones of the hand, which allows the assessment of the skeletal maturity with an appropriate database of reference bones, similar to the atlas based methods. The proposed algorithm uses an extended active contour model for the segmentation of the hand bones, which incorporates a-priori knowledge of shape and topology of the bones in an additional energy term. This 'scene knowledge' is integrated in a complex hierarchical image model, that is used for the image analysis task.