Licensing opportunity
Researchers in the School of Dentistry at the University of Manchester have developed a low-cost, automated way of identifying osteoporosis sufferers from standard dental X-rays. They are now looking for equipment manufacturers who would be interested in applying the software within their systems.
The method is the result of a three-year EU-funded collaboration with the universities of Athens, Leuven, Amsterdam and Malmo.
Even though osteoporosis affects over 35 per cent of women in their seventies, there is no wide-scale screening for the disease, due to the cost and scarcity of specialist equipment and staff.
The team developed software for detecting osteoporosis during routine dental X-rays, by automatically measuring the thickness of part of the patient’s lower jaw. This draws on ‘active shape modeling’ technology developed at Manchester’s Division of Imaging Sciences to automatically detect jaw cortex widths of less than 3millimetres – a key indicator of osteoporosis – during the X-ray process.
At the start of the study the researchers tested 652 women for osteoporosis using the current “gold standard”, and highly expensive, DXA test, identifying 140 sufferers.
The automated X-ray test immediately flagged-up over half of these. The patients concerned may not otherwise have been tested for osteoporosis, but on the basis of the X-ray test could be referred for DXA testing.
As well as being virtually no extra work for the dentist, the diagnosis does not depend on patients being aware that they are at risk of the disease.
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