Reliability of Hounsfield Unit for Assessing Asymmetrical Vertebral Bone Mass in Adult Degenerative Scoliosis

Abstract

Lin-Yu Jin,1,2,* Xin-Jin Su,3,* Shuai Xu,1 Hai-Ying Liu,1 Xin-Feng Li2 1Department of Spinal Surgery, Peking University People’s Hospital, Peking University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Orthopedics, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Prevention and Treatment of Bone and Joint Diseases, Shanghai Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Spinal Surgery, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Xin-Feng Li, Department of Orthopedics, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Prevention and Treatment of Bone and Joint Diseases, Shanghai Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, People’s Republic of China, Email [email protected] Hai-Ying Liu, Department of Spinal Surgery, Peking University People’s Hospital, Peking University, No. 11, South Xizhimen Street, Beijing, 100044, People’s Republic of China, Email [email protected]: Hounsfield Unit (HU) has been used to investigate the asymmetrical vertebral bone mass in patients associated with adult degenerative scoliosis (ADS). Therefore, there is an inevitable need to evaluate the performance of HU values in ADS subjects.Methods: A total of 162 patients (81 ADS patients and 81 non-ADS patients) aged ≥ 50 years undergoing the CT examination were reviewed. The HU values of the lumbar vertebral body (including total, convex side, and concave side) at bilateral pedicle plane were obtained and compared. The paired t-test, chi-squared test, independent samples t-test, and interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were used for statistical analyses.Results: The HU values were significantly different between the convex and concave sides of the lumbar vertebral body (P 0.8) for measuring asymmetrical vertebral bone mass in ADS patients.Conclusion: HU value was a high reproducibility method for evaluating the vertebral bone mass in ADS patients. The HU values at the concave sides were significantly higher than that of convex sides at the lumbar vertebral body on the pedicle plane. The prevalence of OP in ADS patients was higher than that of non-ADS patients, especially for females associated with ADS. Moreover, the static asymmetric load did not enhance the bone mass at the concave side compared with the left/right side of non-ADS patients.Keywords: adult degenerative scoliosis, bone mass, Hounsfield units, reliability

Keywords

• adult degenerative scoliosis
• bone mass
• hounsfield units
• reliability.