Bone texture characterization for osteoporosis diagnosis using digital radiography

We introduce texture classification techniques to effectively diagnose osteoporosis in bone radiography data. Osteoporosis is an age-related systemic bone skeletal disorder characterized by low bone mass and bone structure deterioriation that results in increased bone fragility and higher fracture risk. Therefore, early diagnosis can effectively predict fracture risk and prevent the disease. Automated diagnosis from digital radiographs is very challenging since the scans of healthy and osteoporotic subjects show little or no visual differences, and their density histograms mostly overlap. We designed a system to separate healthy from osteoporotic subjects using high-dimensional textural feature representations computed from radiographs. These features were then reduced using feature selection to obtain the more discriminant subset that was finally classified by our methods. The top performing approach yields 79.3% accuracy and 81% area under the ROC over 116 bone radiographs.