Early Diagnosis of Osteoporosis: An Artificial Intelligence-Based Framework

Osteoporosis is a common disease characterized by low bone density and structural deterioration of bone tissue. For a successful course of treatment and fracture avoidance, early diagnosis of this disease is essential. The aim was to provide a novel method for osteoporosis prediction using Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based framework. The purpose was to predict the likelihood of osteoporosis based on the Bone Mineral Density (BMD), along with other characteristics such as age, weight, height, gender, and Body Mass Index (BMI) extracted from medical reports and images collected from a comprehensive medical center in Lebanon. Three machine-learning algorithms were implemented and tested, Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Decision Trees (DT). Variety of quantitative statistical metrics were used to evaluate the performance of our framework, upon training and testing our algorithms. The metrics that were employed to evaluate our results included accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and F-score, in addition to the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve and the Area Under the Curve (AUC). Experimental Results demonstrated that both the SVM and LR algorithms achieved the highest accuracy of detection of osteoporosis as compared to existing algorithms applied in this field, with an accuracy of 89%. The sensitivity of diagnosis obtained was 98% by LR and 97% by SVM and surpassed the sensitivity obtained by DT. As such LR showed the best performance. The output of the algorithms could help medical doctors assess patients automatically. These findings demonstrated the potential of AI in osteoporosis prediction and thus prevention, highlighting the significance of early diagnosis. Thereby as a future prospect, choosing carefully the framework is crucial and additional algorithms have to be considered and tested.