A novel approach for evaluating bone mineral density of hips based on Sobel gradient-based map of radiographs utilizing convolutional neural network.

Osteoporosis, which is a common disorder associated with low bone mineral density (BMD), is one of the primary reasons for hip fracture. It not only limits mobility, but also makes the patient suffer from pain. Unlike traditional methods, which require both expensive equipment and long scanning times, this study aims to develop a novel technique employing a convolutional neural network (CNN) directly on radiographs of the hips to evaluate BMD. To construct the dataset, X-ray photographs of lower limbs and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) results of the hips of patients were collected. The core of this research is a deep learning-based model that was trained using the pre-processed X-rays images of 510 hips as the input data and the BMD values obtained from DXA as the standard reference. To improve performance quality, the radiographs of the hips were processed with a Sobel algorithm to extract the gradient magnitude maps, and an ensemble artificial neural network which analyses the outputs of CNN models corresponding to three Singh sites and biological parameters was utilized. The superior performance of the proposed method was confirmed by the high correlation coefficient of 0.8075 (p<0.0001) of the BMD measured by DXA in a total of 150 testing cases, with only 0.12 s required for applying the computing configuration to a single X-ray image.