Yarhere Iroro Enameguolo¹, Agi Chukuemeka^1,

Background: Accurate bone age reading for endocrine evaluation of children is important for accurate diagnosis and eventual treatment with hormones or other medications. Requests made to radiology have often overestimated the bone ages in our setting. Objective: To test inter rater reliability of bone age readings by paediatric endocrinologists and radiologists, and the validity between these readings and the BoneXpert software. Methods: Twenty-seven raters (12 paediatric endocrinologists and 15 radiologists) were requested to score 4 images, using whatever methods were convenient for them. An interrater correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to assess the level of agreement between the two disciplines and paired sample t test was used to validate the scores between the raters and BoneXpert software. Results: The interrater reliability for the raters were 0.984 (paediatric endocrinologists) and 0.986 (radiologists). When validated with BoneXpert reading, 46.6% of radiologists had significantly higher bone age scores vs 16.6% of paediatric endocrinologists. Radiologists were less consulted and performed fewer bone age reading than paediatric endocrinologists. Conclusion: Interrater reliability of bone age reading between paediatric endocrinologists and radiologists in Nigeria were similar, however, more radiologists exaggerated the bone ages of the X radiographs presented to them. The frequency of bone age reading by the specialists positively influenced their proficiency when rated with the BoneXpert software.

bone age reading, paediatric endocrinologist, radiologist, interrater reliability, Nigeria