Abstract

Osteoporosis is considered as a major publichealth problem, second only to cardiovascular diseases. Thegold standard for its diagnosis is currently represented bydual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which, however,suffers from some important drawbacks. In order toovercome such limitations, the use of ultrasound (US)techniques has been proposed. In this paper, a novelapproach to the diagnosis of osteoporosis through US scanson lumbar spine and proximal femur is described. Theapproach relies on the estimation of diagnostic parametersby measuring the degree of similarity between the spectra ofthe raw radiofrequency (RF) echo signals and referencespectral models of osteoporotic or healthy bones. Referencemodels are representative of the features of eitherosteoporotic or healthy bone structures and are matchedwith subject age, sex, ethnic group and body mass index totake into account variations in bone physiological conditionand subject anatomy. In this paper, the methodsimplemented to build the database of reference models andto estimate diagnostic parameters are presented. Theperformance of the approach was assessed on a total of 145Caucasian underweight and normal-weighted women withage in the range from 46 to 55. Performance was assessedthrough direct comparison with DXA results. The obtainedmedian relative error in the estimation of bone mineraldensity was as low as 9.1% on women aged 51 to 55 yearsand 12.0% on women with age in the range from 46 to 50years. Moreover, for the two groups, the estimation errorwas lower than 20% for 81% and 78.6% of subjects,respectively. Therefore, the proposed method combines theadvantages of the use of US techniques with a remarkablediagnostic accuracy, thus lending itself to the possibility ofbeing used for population mass screenings.

Autore Pugliese

• Conversano Francesco , Casciaro Sergio

Tutti gli autori

• V. Villani; F. Conversano; M. Aventaggiato; F. Chiriacò; M. Muratore; S. Casciaro

Titolo volume/Rivista

Non Disponibile

Anno di pubblicazione

2014

ISSN

Non Disponibile

ISBN

978-92-990073-5-8

Numero di citazioni Wos

Nessuna citazione

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Numero di citazioni Scopus

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Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Settori ERC

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Codici ASJC

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