Identification of Adolescent Menarche Status using Biplanar X-ray Images: A Deep Learning-based Method

The purpose of this study is to develop an automated method for identifying the menarche status of adolescents based on EOS radiographs. We designed a deep-learning-based algorithm that contains a region of interest detection network and a classification network. The algorithm was trained and tested on a retrospective dataset of 738 adolescent EOS cases using a five-fold cross-validation strategy and was subsequently tested on a clinical validation set of 259 adolescent EOS cases. On the clinical validation set, our algorithm achieved accuracy of 0.942, macro precision of 0.933, macro recall of 0.938, and a macro F1-score of 0.935. The algorithm showed almost perfect performance in distinguishing between males and females, with the main classification errors found in females aged 12 to 14 years. Specifically for females, the algorithm had accuracy of 0.910, sensitivity of 0.943, and specificity of 0.855 in estimating menarche status, with an area under the curve of 0.959. The kappa value of the algorithm, in comparison to the actual situation, was 0.806, indicating strong agreement between the algorithm and the real-world scenario. This method can efficiently analyze EOS radiographs and identify the menarche status of adolescents. It is expected to become a routine clinical tool and provide references for doctors’ decisions under specific clinical conditions.