# Hand bone age estimation using divide and conquer strategy and lightweight convolutional neural networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14986 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14986/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04467/) (2016)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [CyCNN: A Rotation Invariant CNN using Polar Mapping and Cylindrical Convolution Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10588/) (2020)
- [Partial Connection Based on Channel Attention for Differentiable Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00791/) (2022)
- [Surrogate-assisted Particle Swarm Optimisation for Evolving Variable-length Transferable Blocks for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01556/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Detection of retinal diseases using an accelerated reused convolutional network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04232/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the Bone Age of children is very important for diagnosing growth defects, and related diseases, and estimating the final height that children reach after maturity. For this reason, it is widely used in different countries. Traditional methods for estimating bone age are performed by comparing atlas images and radiographic images of the left hand, which is time-consuming and error-prone. To estimate bone age using deep neural network models, a lot of research has been done, our effort has been to improve the accuracy and speed of this process by using the introduced approach. After creating and analyzing our initial model, we focused on preprocessing and made the inputs smaller, and increased their quality. we selected small regions of hand radiographs and estimated the age of the bone only according to these regions. by doing this we improved bone age estimation accuracy even further than what was achieved in related works, without increasing the required computational resource. We reached a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 3.90 months in the range of 0-20 years and an MAE of 3.84 months in the range of 1-18 years on the RSNA test set.