Patent ID: 7848893

Claim:
A method to estimate the skeletal maturity value of a human, the method comprising: a. obtaining a digital radiograph of at least one bone of the human hand; b. determining a border of the bone and determining a set of at least 15 points on the border called shape points, each point representing a specific anatomical location on that the bone; c. determining a lower-dimensional representation of the shape points in terms of shape parameters derived from a transformation of the shape point coordinates; d. sampling image intensities in a bone region or a part thereof, at sampling points defined relative to the shape points, followed by a transformation into a lower-dimensional representation yielding intensity parameters; and e. determining a skeletal maturity value from the determined representation of the border and the image intensities, the maturity being expressed as bone age, maturity stage, fractional stage or scores, wherein the steps a-e are performed by at least one computer.