Automatic assessment of mandibular bone using support vector machine for the diagnosis of osteoporosis

This study aimed to realize and compare the effectiveness of cortical and trabecular bone measures in a computer-aided system based on support vector machine (SVM) for identifying postmenopausal women with low BMD or osteoporosis. Dental panoramic radiographs of 69 postmenopausal women, as well as bone mineral density (BMD) assessments at the lumbar spine and the femoral neck were used. Average width and variance of continuous measurements of mandibular cortical bone and distribution of average length and angle (direction) of trabecular bone segments on panoramic radiographs were measured by computer-aided systems and used as inputs. The accuracy of the cortical measures using average width and variance was 87% and of the trabecular measures using average length and angle was 65% with RBF kernel-SVM method for diagnosing women with low BMD at the lumbar spine. Likewise, the accuracy of combined cortical and trabecular bone measures was 88%. Our results suggest that the cortical bone measurement is more appropriate than the trabecular bone measurement for triage screening of osteoporosis.