Bone age determination using only the index finger: a novel approach using a convolutional neural network compared with human radiologists.

CNN-model-determined bone ages from index-finger radiographs are similar to whole-hand bone age interpreted by radiologists in the dataset, as well as a model trained on the whole-hand radiograph. In addition, the index-finger model performed better than the ground truth compared to subspecialty trained pediatric radiologists also using only the index finger to determine bone age. The radiologist interpreting bone age can use the second digit as a reliable starting point in their search pattern.