Towards Automated Athletic Bone Age Determination by Wrist MRI: Correlation of Quantitative Growth Plate Features with FIFA Grading System
Hamed Yousefia, Mansoor Fatehib
a-School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, IRAN
b- Medical Imaging Informatics Research Center, Tehran, IRAN
Purpose
Complying fair play in U17 football matches is not limited to doping tests and ethical issues during the match but also includes age limits because over-aged players can cause sport injuries and may change the result of the match by stronger bodies and higher expertise. Although birth certificate is the major legal document to define chronological age of the players but unreliable birth certificates have resulted in medical investigations to assure compliance with age limits in U17 teams particularly in Asian and African countries [1][2]. According to physiological studies, bone age has the highest correlation with chronological age.
In order to avoid unnecessary x-ray exposure in healthy young athletes, MRI has replaced conventional wrist and hand x-ray in this particular group. FIFA has adopted a grading system based on closure of epiphyseal plates in distal radius.
Segmentation and 3D shape modeling of the epiphyseal plate has already been reported by our group. Dealing with the epiphyseal plate as a discrete 3D object and extracting quantitative features of this object has been considered a promising approach to understand bone age determination using MRI.
The purpose of this project was to explore correlations between quantitative features extracte facilitate development of a fully automated CAD system for MRI bone age determination...
