A Pilot Study on Hip Bone Mineral Densities Estimation from Forearm CBCT images

In this paper, we defined the relative cross-sectional area of forearm cortical bone and investigated its correlation with hip bone mineral density values of total femur, femoral neck, femoral trochanter, femoral inter-trochanter and femoral ward's triangle, respectively. Based on the correlations, we established a linear transformation between the relative cross-sectional area of forearm cortical bone and each hip bone BMD. We obtained forearm images using CBCT and hip bone BMDs using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) for 28 subjects. We also investigated the optimal forearm region to provide the strongest correlation coefficient. We used the optimized forearm region to establish each linear transformation to estimate BMD values for total femur, femoral neck, femoral trochanter, femoral inter-trochanter and femoral ward's triangle from the relative cross-sectional area of forearm cortical bone, respectively. We observed the strong correlations with total femur (r=0.889), femoral neck (r=0.924), femoral trochanter (r=0.821), femoral inter-trochanter (r=0.867) and femoral ward's triangle (r=0.895), respectively. The strongest correlation was observed in the forearm mid-shaft regions. Our results suggest that the hip bone BMD values can be simply estimated from forearm CBCT images in a convenient sitting position without X-ray exposure on a hip including genital organs, and may be useful for screening osteoporosis.