Automatic opportunistic osteoporosis screening in routine CT: improved prediction of patients with prevalent vertebral fractures compared to DXA

Abstract

• Opportunistic osteoporosis screening of spinal bone measures derived from clinical routine CT is feasible in a fully automatic fashion using a deep learning-driven framework ( https://anduin.bonescreen.de ). • Manually sampled volumetric BMD (vBMD) and automatically assessed trabecular and integral vBMD were the best predictors for prevalent vertebral fractures. • Except for bone mineral content, all CT-based bone measures performed significantly better than DXA-based measures. • We introduce diagnostic thresholds of integral vBMD for osteoporosis (< 160 mg/cm³) and low bone mass (160 ≤ BMD < 190 mg/cm³) with almost equal sensitivity and specificity compared to conventional thresholds of quantitative CT as proposed by the American College of Radiology (osteoporosis < 80 mg/cm³).