Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Bone age assessment is used in the management and monitoring of treatment effects in growth disorders. This may be associated with a considerable variability between reporters. This subjectivity has raised questions about acceptable levels of error in our current practice and has led us to search for other tools for assessing bone ages.

Method: A single observer was trained in reporting bone ages using Tanner Whitehouse 3 atlas and these results were compared to an automated bone age scoring system (BonExpert).

Results: Currently this study includes 42 patients (21 male) with an age range of 7.1 to 16.4 years, who have had bone age assessments undertaken for clinical indications.

The mean (S.D.) decimal age of the group was 11.6 years (3.7). The mean difference between the single observer and BonExpert was −0.03 years (0.71). The mean percentage difference is 0.02% (6.2%). Overall 5 bone ages had a difference of greater than 1 year between the manual and automated scoring systems.

Conclusion: An automated bone age scoring system may be a reliable and reproducible method to score bone ages utilising the TW3 system.