Hand Radiograph Analysis and Joint Space Location Improvement for Image Interpretation

Hand radiograph analysis is extremely exhausting and time consuming for radiologists, not because of the complexity, but because of the precision required during diagnosis. Due to this fact, automatic analysis of the joint space width of all joints in a hand would be indispensable. In the following paper, an improvement of a method used to quantify the minimal JSW in hand radiographs, proposed by the author in his previous works, is considered. The proposed changes have an impact on initial pre-processing and joint space location. As a result of experiments conducted on more than 1100 joint spaces, the overall error of pre-processing and joint location decreases from 10.8% to 2.59% after changes.