Osteoporosis Prescreening and Bone Mineral Density Prediction using Dental Panoramic Radiographs

Recent studies have shown that Dental Panoramic Radiograph (DPR) images have great potential for prescreening of osteoporosis given the high degree of correlation between the bone density and trabecular bone structure. Most of the research works in these area had used pretrained models for feature extraction and classification with good success. However, when the size of the data set is limited it becomes difficult to use these pretrained networks and gain high confidence scores. In this paper, we evaluated the diagnostic performance of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN)based computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) system in the detection of osteoporosis on panoramic radiographs, through a comparison with diagnoses made by oral and maxillofacial radiologists. With the available labelled dataset of 70 images, results were reproduced for the preliminary study model. Furthermore, the model performance was enhanced using different computer vision techniques. Specifically, the age meta data available for each patient was leveraged to obtain more accurate predictions. Lastly, we tried to leverage these images, ages and osteoporotic labels to create a neural network based regression model and predict the Bone Mineral Density (BMD) value for each patient. Experimental results showed that the proposed CAD system was in high accord with experienced oral and maxillofacial radiologists in detecting osteoporosis and achieved 87.86% accuracy.Clinical relevance- This paper presents a method to detect osteoporosis using DPR images and age data with multi-column DCNN and then leverage this data to predict Bone Mineral Density for each patient.