Automated Opportunistic Trabecular Volumetric Bone Mineral Density Extraction Outperforms Manual Measurements for the Prediction of Vertebral Fractures in Routine CT

Opportunistic osteoporosis screening using multidetector CT-scans (MDCT) and convolutional neural network (CNN)-derived segmentations of the spine to generate volumetric bone mineral density (vBMD) bears the potential to improve incidental osteoporotic vertebral fracture (VF) prediction. However, the performance compared to the established manual opportunistic vBMD measures remains unclear. Hence, we investigated patients with a routine MDCT of the spine who had developed a new osteoporotic incidental VF and frequency matched to patients without incidental VFs as assessed on follow-up MDCT images after 1.5 years. Automated vBMD was generated using CNN-generated segmentation masks and asynchronous calibration. Additionally, manual vBMD was sampled by two radiologists. Automated vBMD measurements in patients with incidental VFs at 1.5-years follow-up (n = 53) were significantly lower compared to patients without incidental VFs (n = 104) (83.6 ± 29.4 mg/cm³ vs. 102.1 ± 27.7 mg/cm³, p < 0.001). This comparison was not significant for manually assessed vBMD (99.2 ± 37.6 mg/cm³ vs. 107.9 ± 33.9 mg/cm³, p = 0.30). When adjusting for age and sex, both automated and manual vBMD measurements were significantly associated with incidental VFs at 1.5-year follow-up, however, the associations were stronger for automated measurements (β = −0.32; 95% confidence interval (CI): −20.10, 4.35; p < 0.001) compared to manual measurements (β = −0.15; 95% CI: −11.16, 5.16; p < 0.03). In conclusion, automated opportunistic measurements are feasible and can be useful for bone mineral density assessment in clinical routine.