In the process of intelligent bone age assessment for Chinese ethnicity, generalized convolutional network models are not well targeted in extracting specific features in medical skeletal images and lack specificity in training and predicting skeletal developmental features in different ethnicities. This study aims to propose a hybrid improved deep residual network model, ZH05-DL-ResNet50, focusing on intelligent bone age assessment for Chinese ethnicity. In the process of building the ZH05-DL-ResNet50 model. First, multiple overlapping texture enhancement layers are introduced through combinatorial optimization, which can better characterize the global features of hand bone radiographs while using less texture information, reducing the interference of redundant information and freeing up computational power; second, the China-05′s spatial focusing mechanism is designed so that the model can intelligently focus on the region of interest, efficiently locate and automatically learn key image information; Finally, the model can be used for intelligent bone age assessment of Chinese ethnicity by constructing a 50-layer residual depth network, the superposition enhancement layer and the focusing mechanism are fused to form the ZH05-DL-ResNet50 model, which mitigates the problem of gradient disappearance and explosion caused by the increase of network depth, and reduces the information loss and depletion of the multi-layer texture superposition features in the focus region of interest. The training was performed using the Chinese ethnographic dataset provided and created by Tsinghua Changgeng Hospital, where 10 % of the radiographs were used as the test set and the rest as the training and validation sets. The overall performance of the models was estimated by comparing the average accuracy and loss values of different models, and the overall performance between model training and model design was evaluated using the data distribution (Distribution) and histogram of bias weight distribution (Histogram). The results showed that the average accuracy of the bone age estimation model was 98.1 % and the average error on the test set was 0.312 years. Evaluation of the model visualization and accuracy comparison showed that the model performed well and was more appropriate and accurate than other bone age estimation models. Therefore, the first intelligent bone age assessment model for Chinese ethnicity, ZH05-DL-ResNet50, was created, which differs from the untargeted nature of other intelligent bone age assessment models, and is used to train and predict hand bone radiographs more appropriately and accurately for Chinese ethnicity.
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