Project description
Faster, more accurate osteoporosis diagnosis
As the most common bone disease in humans, osteoporosis is a major health problem. But it can be prevented and treated. If left untreated, however, osteoporosis can result in serious bone fractures, especially in the hip and spine, causing serious pain and disability. Early diagnosis is vital but hindered by inefficient screening methods. In this context, the EU-funded BoneScreen project will launch a fully automated method of evaluation of existing computed tomography data of patients. It will enable the calculation of volumetric bone mineral density to predict fracture risk and will enable precise, non-invasive, fully calibrated and comfortable application for accurate, fast osteoporosis diagnosis.
Objective
Worldwide, an osteoporotic fracture occurs every three seconds; most of them in Europe, where the economic burden has been estimated at €37 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 at an early stage. As current state-of-the-art screening methods are neither sufficiently available nor accurate, there is an urgent need for readily available and accurate screening systems.
BoneScreen will fill this gap and provide a low-cost and accurate screening method, available for millions of patients. BoneScreen introduces a fully automated solution to evaluate existing computed tomography data of patients. BoneScreen will calculate volumetric bone mineral density (vBMD), the most reliable and accurate single predictor of a patient’s fracture risk. In contrast to existing methods, BoneScreen is fully automated; it is purely non-invasive and excludes any additional radiation dose or patient discomfort; it is fully calibrated, yielding high precision and allowing for the application of established diagnostic categories; it works for all vertebral levels, allowing for inclusion of scans with variable coverage. Additionally, the functionality of BoneScreen is easily extendable, e.g. for detecting fractures or metastasis.
The overall goal of this proposal is to initiate the start-up process for a company commercializing the research developments to date. Specific objectives are to (1) increase the technology readiness level of our current research software to reliably work in different hospital environments; in particular we will include an automated calibration, allowing for accurate processing in >98% of cases; (2) increase the awareness of the possibilities provided by such a screening tool, both in the academic and non-academic radiology community; and (3) develop a strategy for marketing and securing IPR.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-POC-LS - ERC Proof of Concept Lump Sum PilotHost institution
81675 Muenchen
Germany