Building Prevention

is to prevent fractures and make dignified ageing possible: Bonescreen will increase screening rates for osteoporosis by utilising existing medical imaging data. With this, Bonescreen contributes to a prevention-based healthcare system away from primarily treating complications [Löffler MT et al., Eur Radiol. 2021; Sollmann N et al., J Bone Miner Res. 2022].

of women and 20% of men older than 50 years will have an osteoporotic fracture during their lifetime. In Europe, osteoporotic fractures are the fourth leading cause of morbidity, after ischaemic heart disease, dementia and lung cancer, but ahead of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and ischaemic stroke.

of patients who should be treated according to current osteoporosis guidelines do NOT receive their appropriate treatment in Germany, with similar figures across Europe. This huge treatment gap is mainly caused by a diagnostic gap, which in turn is due to a lack of appropriate screening strategies [McCloskey E et al., Osteoporos Int 2021].

were spent in Europe to treat osteoporosis-related fragility fractures in 2019. Only €1.7bn were spent on medication that can prevent subsequent fractures. These numbers don’t account for additional personal and societal costs due to pain, reduced mobility, disability, lost working days and increased mortality [Kanis JA et al., Arch Osteoporos. 2021].

specificity was observed for opportunistic quantitative CT to predict vertebral fractures during follow-up in a study by Löffler et al. The overall diagnostic performance, measured as the area under the curve (AUC), significantly outperformed dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) in multiple studies [Chalhoub D et al., Bone 2016; Löffler MT et al., Eur Radiol. 2019].

Despite widely available and effective treatment options, more than 97% of osteoporosis-related health care costs are spent on treating fractures and only less than 3% on prevention. As osteoporosis is well treatable in early stages, many medical societies advocate a population-based screening programme based on bone density measurements.

of humans have anomalies at the spine, where additional lumbar vertebrae are the most frequent ones among Europeans, while thoracolumbar transitional vertebrae dominate in Asia. Our fully automated labelling and segmentation readily and reliably identifies those anomalies and is consistent with functional nerve anatomy [Ishiguro K et al. Sci Rep 2020].