Vision system for bone measurement from digital hand radiograph

Vision systems are being used in the domain of medical image processing. Given a digitized hand radiograph, we segment-out specific bones and measure particular parameters of the bones. Observer variability is reduced by the system and the resulting measurements may be useful for detecting short-term skeletal growth abnormalities in children and age estimation. In addition a clinical application like metacarpal index determination which is a sensitive index for detecting bone quality in chronic renal failure can also be obtained. This paper discusses a scheme by which this has been implemented.