Parents should be alert to the early bone age of their children. "Speeding up" may not be a good thing.

Bone age is the abbreviation of bone age. Bone age assessment can accurately reflect a person's growth and development level. Most people are familiar with bone age measurement. I remember my parents taking me to the hospital to measure my bone age when I was a child. By measuring bone age, we can know the biological age of children and infer their growth and development potential.

Every parent is definitely concerned about growth and development. It is a joy to see your child grow taller, but sometimes premature growth can be a hidden danger.

I have read a report before about a 9-year-old boy who was considered tall in his class at the time, and his mother was very happy. However, after being reminded by a doctor, I realized that this might be a sign of precocious puberty in the child. After examination, the boy's bone age has reached the level of a 13-year-old child, but his height is far from that of a 13-year-old. In fact, he has already had precocious puberty. If he is not treated in time, the large increase in sex hormones in the body during puberty will also cause the epiphysis to close prematurely, and the child may never grow taller.

For the physical and mental health of children, bone age testing is very important

From this point of view, it is very necessary to be taken by your parents to measure your bone age when you are a child.

As one of the important means to determine whether a child develops prematurely, bone age measurement is closely related to growth, and it is also an important indicator for predicting a child's adult height. It should be noted that a person can only grow taller before the epiphyseal line closes. When the epiphyseal line closes, a person's height will stop growing. Once the epiphyseal line closes, no one can help the child, and the possibility of growing taller is very small. If the abnormal development of a child's height is ignored, it is likely to develop into dwarfism, which will affect the child for life.

Of course, you may think that being a little short is okay as long as the child is healthy and happy. However, according to child endocrinologists, more than 90% of adolescents with dwarfism have psychological disorders, and some children even hate going to school because of this.

Therefore, in order to ensure the physical and mental health of children, it is very important to check their bone age regularly.

Although bone age measurement is good, traditional methods have limitations

Generally speaking, if the difference between bone age and biological age is within ±1 year, it is considered normal development. If it is 1 year greater than biological age, it is considered early development, and if it is less than 1 year, it is considered delayed development.

So how do you detect bone age? In clinical practice, wrist X-rays are generally used. Doctors then observe the development of the ossification center based on the film and use the GP atlas method and TW3 method to identify bone age.

The GP atlas method is the earliest complete atlas bone age identification method. It mainly involves doctors comparing hand bone X-rays with the naked eye based on paper image albums. This method is highly subjective and has poor clinical accuracy, which can result in large errors in the test results.

Although the TW3 method has significantly improved accuracy compared to the atlas method, the testing process is complicated and it takes at least 15 minutes to test a child's bone age. With the progress of the times, parents pay more and more attention to the growth and development of their children, and the amount of bone age testing is increasing. Neither of these two methods can meet the current huge market demand.

Artificial intelligence measures bone age and gives results in seconds

When manual testing has limitations, the advantages of artificial intelligence are very obvious. Deep learning based on massive amounts of high-quality data and the establishment of a prediction model can make bone age testing efficient and accurate. However, the first thing that needs to be solved is how to calculate to achieve this goal.

Detecting bone age is nothing more than deep learning on images, and we usually think of graphics processing units (GPUs). Although graphics processing units (GPUs) are designed to process images well, data scientists must work around their inherent memory limitations when building certain models.

So Intel and Philips chose another way - using Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and the OpenVINO toolkit to use bone X-rays to develop a bone age prediction model. Because Intel Xeon Scalable processors do not have the memory limitations mentioned above, they can accelerate complex mixed workloads, including large memory-intensive models common in the field of medical imaging. For a large subset of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, Intel Xeon Scalable processors can better meet the needs of data scientists than GPU-based systems.

The results showed that the bone age prediction model was accelerated 188 times, from an initial benchmark of 1.42 images per second to a final optimized 267.1 images per second.

Using this model, not only will the results obtained be more objective, but it will also greatly reduce the workload of doctors who read films, thereby better prioritizing cases and reducing hospital costs while providing better medical services to more patients.

Let more children and parents benefit

This efficient and accurate bone age prediction model can even be used in the regular physical examinations of primary and secondary school students. By adding bone age testing to the annual physical examinations of students arranged by the school, we can always pay attention to the height of children. If problems are found, we can intervene early to avoid regrets.

Doctors recommend that it is best to perform bone age testing when the child is 3-10 years old. Before puberty, the child has just begun to develop. Early testing can also provide information about the child's development. If problems are found, more time can be given for treatment and adjustment. During adolescence, bone age testing can determine whether the child is developing normally, especially whether the height estimate meets the ideal target.

The test results can also guide parents in their children's diet and daily behavior habits. If they want their children to grow taller, parents can adjust their children's diet structure based on the test results and doctor's advice, and let their children exercise more. Exercises such as playing basketball, jumping, and pull-ups are all conducive to height growth. This way, both the children and themselves will have no regrets and the children will develop in a healthy direction physically and mentally.

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