Residual Attention based Network for Hand Bone Age Assessment
This work addresses the problem of automating hand bone age assessment for medical diagnostics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing segmentation and attention techniques.
The paper tackled hand bone age assessment by proposing a framework that segments hands from X-ray images and uses attention to focus on key components, achieving superior results on the RSNA pediatric bone age dataset compared to previous methods.
Computerized automatic methods have been employed to boost the productivity as well as objectiveness of hand bone age assessment. These approaches make predictions according to the whole X-ray images, which include other objects that may introduce distractions. Instead, our framework is inspired by the clinical workflow (Tanner-Whitehouse) of hand bone age assessment, which focuses on the key components of the hand. The proposed framework is composed of two components: a Mask R-CNN subnet of pixelwise hand segmentation and a residual attention network for hand bone age assessment. The Mask R-CNN subnet segments the hands from X-ray images to avoid the distractions of other objects (e.g., X-ray tags). The hierarchical attention components of the residual attention subnet force our network to focus on the key components of the X-ray images and generate the final predictions as well as the associated visual supports, which is similar to the assessment procedure of clinicians. We evaluate the performance of the proposed pipeline on the RSNA pediatric bone age dataset and the results demonstrate its superiority over the previous methods.