Combining Register and Radiological Visits Data Allows to Reliably Identify Incident Wrist Fractures

To evaluate how comprehensively wrist fractures can be tracked from the national medical registers, and to propose a method for complementing the register data using time stamps of wrist radiography visits recorded in the radiological image archive.

For the Kuopio Osteoporosis Risk Factor and Prevention Study (OSTPRE) cohort of 14220 post-menopausal women, we analysed the data from the Care Register for Health Care, Register for Primary Health Care Visits, self-reports, radiological image archive PACS, and patient records to identify the wrist fractures occurred between 2011 and 2021. Using this gold standard of fractures, we validated the coverage of the registers and image archive and created algorithms to automatically identify fracture events from the registers and/or metadata of wrist radiography visits.

We show that wrist fractures cannot be comprehensively identified based on national registers. To remedy this, our proposed method of combining register and image archive data can lift the coverage from 81% to 94% and reduce false discoveries from 6% to 2%.

The proposed method offers a more reliable way of gathering fracture information. Comprehensive fracture identification is essential in many research settings, such as incidence statistics, prevention studies, and risk assessment models.