Chronological age estimation of lateral cephalometric radiographs with deep learning
This work addresses the time-consuming and subjective nature of manual age estimation in medical imaging, offering an interpretable deep learning solution for forensic or clinical applications.
The authors tackled the problem of automating age estimation from lateral cephalometric radiographs, achieving a mean absolute error of 1.250 years, which outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks particularly in data-scarce age groups.
The traditional manual age estimation method is crucial labor based on many kinds of the X-Ray image. Some current studies have shown that lateral cephalometric(LC) images can be used to estimate age. However, these methods are based on manually measuring some image features and making age estimates based on experience or scoring. Therefore, these methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive, and the effect will be affected by subjective opinions. In this work, we propose a saliency map-enhanced age estimation method, which can automatically perform age estimation based on LC images. Meanwhile, it can also show the importance of each region in the image for age estimation, which undoubtedly increases the method's Interpretability. Our method was tested on 3014 LC images from 4 to 40 years old. The MEA of the experimental result is 1.250, which is less than the result of the state-of-the-art benchmark because it performs significantly better in the age group with fewer data. Besides, our model is trained in each area with a high contribution to age estimation in LC images, so the effect of these different areas on the age estimation task was verified. Consequently, we conclude that the proposed saliency map enhancements chronological age estimation method of lateral cephalometric radiographs can work well in chronological age estimation task, especially when the amount of data is small. Besides, compared with traditional deep learning, our method is also interpretable.