Scientific Reports (Apr 2022)

Identification of osteoporosis using ensemble deep learning model with panoramic radiographs and clinical covariates

  • Shintaro Sukegawa,
  • Ai Fujimura,
  • Akira Taguchi,
  • Norio Yamamoto,
  • Akira Kitamura,
  • Ryosuke Goto,
  • Keisuke Nakano,
  • Kiyofumi Takabatake,
  • Hotaka Kawai,
  • Hitoshi Nagatsuka,
  • Yoshihiko Furuki

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10150-x
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 1
pp. 1 – 10

Abstract

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Abstract Osteoporosis is becoming a global health issue due to increased life expectancy. However, it is difficult to detect in its early stages owing to a lack of discernible symptoms. Hence, screening for osteoporosis with widely used dental panoramic radiographs would be very cost-effective and useful. In this study, we investigate the use of deep learning to classify osteoporosis from dental panoramic radiographs. In addition, the effect of adding clinical covariate data to the radiographic images on the identification performance was assessed. For objective labeling, a dataset containing 778 images was collected from patients who underwent both skeletal-bone-mineral density measurement and dental panoramic radiography at a single general hospital between 2014 and 2020. Osteoporosis was assessed from the dental panoramic radiographs using convolutional neural network (CNN) models, including EfficientNet-b0, -b3, and -b7 and ResNet-18, -50, and -152. An ensemble model was also constructed with clinical covariates added to each CNN. The ensemble model exhibited improved performance on all metrics for all CNNs, especially accuracy and AUC. The results show that deep learning using CNN can accurately classify osteoporosis from dental panoramic radiographs. Furthermore, it was shown that the accuracy can be improved using an ensemble model with patient covariates.