Unleashing the Potential of Vision Transformer for Automated Bone Age Assessment in Hand X-rays

자동 뼈 연령 평가를 위한 비전 트랜스포머와 손 X 선 영상 분석

Bone age assessment is a crucial task in pediatric radiology for assessing growth and development in children. In this paper, we explore the potential of Vision Transformer, a state-of-the-art deep learning model, for bone age assessment using X-ray images. We generate heatmap outputs using a pre-trained Vision Transformer model on a publicly available dataset of hand X-ray images and show that the model tends to focus on the overall hand and only the bone part of the image, indicating its potential for accurately identifying the regions of interest for bone age assessment without the need for pre-processing to remove background noise. We also suggest two methods for extracting the region of interest from the heatmap output. Our study suggests that Vision Transformer holds great potential for bone age assessment using X-ray images, as it can provide accurate and interpretable output that may assist radiologists in identifying potential abnormalities or areas of interest in the X-ray image.