  Bone age assessment is challenging in clinical practice due to the
complicated bone age assessment process. Current automatic bone age assessment
methods were designed with rare consideration of the diagnostic logistics and
thus may yield certain uninterpretable hidden states and outputs. Consequently,
doctors can find it hard to cooperate with such models harmoniously because it
is difficult to check the correctness of the model predictions. In this work,
we propose a new graph-based deep learning framework for bone age assessment
with hand radiographs, called Doctor Imitator (DI). The architecture of DI is
designed to learn the diagnostic logistics of doctors using the scoring methods
(e.g., the Tanner-Whitehouse method) for bone age assessment. Specifically, the
convolutions of DI capture the local features of the anatomical regions of
interest (ROIs) on hand radiographs and predict the ROI scores by our proposed
Anatomy-based Group Convolution, summing up for bone age prediction. Besides,
we develop a novel Dual Graph-based Attention module to compute
patient-specific attention for ROI features and context attention for ROI
scores. As far as we know, DI is the first automatic bone age assessment
framework following the scoring methods without fully supervised hand
radiographs. Experiments on hand radiographs with only bone age supervision
verify that DI can achieve excellent performance with sparse parameters and
provide more interpretability.
