Result and Discussion - Segmentation of Hand Bone for Bone Age Assessment - page 115

Fig. 4.5 a Block of segmented hand bone without any artifact. b Block of segmented hand bone
with artifact in non-region-of-interest
However, in terms of potential value of usefulness for subsequent procedures
in computerized bone age assessment, both images have distinct differences.
Figure 4.5 a has much more potential value of usefulness than Fig. 4.5 b, as the
artifacts in Fig. 4.5 b will pose inferior effects on subsequent pattern recognition
procedures especially in automated localization of regions-of-interest. In short,
both pertinent information preservation and potential value of usefulness have to
be taken in consideration when assessing the quality of hand bone segmentation;
however, more concern should be given to pertinent information preservation as
they are the fundamental bone age determination material.
After comparing various supervised evaluations [ 9 , 10 ], three out of them
that seem to be particularly appropriate to express the importance in the eval-
uation of the segmented hand bone in the context of computer-aided skeletal
age scoring system application have been chosen: Figure Of Merits (FOM) pro-
posed by [ 11 ], Figure Of Certainty (FOC) and Fragmentation (FRAG) proposed
by [ 12 ]. One of the main reasons of choosing them is because of their general-
ity; these metrics can be easily customized into specific evaluation context due
to the scaling parameters in the metrics. Secondly, each of them is capable of
measuring one of the important features in segmented hand bone in the context
of computerized BAA using different weight to express the different relative
importance.
The explanation begins with the segmentation quality metrics which are the
functions that measure the degree of similarity between the segmented image by