BoneScreen will revolutionise osteoporosis screening to preserve dignified lives in our ageing societies and save massive amounts of direct and indirect health care costs. As non-invasive, fully automated medical software, BoneScreen can easily be integrated into existing clinical processes, creates no additional labor, does not need dedicated exams and thus will be the first true screening modality that is applicable without a suspicion for osteoporosis. It will be able to identify millions of people at risk for osteoporotic fractures who would never have been screened with any other technique currently available.
Worldwide, an osteoporotic fracture occurs every three seconds; most of them in Europe, where the economic burden of treatment costs has been estimated at €56.9 billion per year, and lost years of life surpass most major cancers. This is hard to comprehend, given that osteoporosis is a preventable, treatable disease if diagnosed early. Currently, patients undergo an additional diagnostic procedure with radiation exposure AFTER the suspicion of osteoporosis has been raised. This merely reactive approach prevents appropriate, early treatment in many patients. BoneScreen uses existing CT data to determine the most important predictors of osteoporosis and fracture risk, namely volumetric bone mineral density and existing vertebral osteoporotic fractures. Within the POC we showed that (1) BoneScreen´s opportunistic approach reveals comparable results to dedicated QCT (2) fully automated calibration allows to evaluate non-contrast and contrast enhanced scans and (3) BoneScreen´s approach can be applied to all levels of the spine.
The next steps will include further validation of the Software and CE-labelling within the recently founded company BoneScreen GmbH.
