Fusion of X-Ray Images and Clinical Data for a Multimodal Deep Learning Prediction Model of Osteoporosis: Algorithm Development and Validation Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Osteoporosis is a bone disease characterized by reduced bone mineral density and mass, which increase the risk of fragility fractures in patients. Artificial intelligence can mine imaging features specific to different bone densities, shapes, and structures and fuse other multimodal features for synergistic diagnosis to improve prediction accuracy. Objective: This study aims to develop a multimodal model that fuses chest X-rays and clinical parameters for opportunistic screening of osteoporosis and to compare and analyze the experimental results with existing methods. Methods: We used multimodal data, including chest X-ray images and clinical data, from a total of 1780 patients at Chongqing Daping Hospital from January 2019 to August 2024. We adopted a probability fusion strategy to construct a multimodal model. In our model, we used a convolutional neural network as the backbone network for image processing and fine-tuned it using a transfer learning technique to suit the specific task of this study. In addition, we introduced a gradient-based wavelet feature extraction method. We combined it with an attention mechanism to assist in feature fusion, which enhanced the model's focus on key regions of the image and further improved its ability to extract image features. Results: The multimodal model proposed in this paper outperforms the traditional methods in the 4 evaluation metrics of area under the curve value, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Compared with using only the X-ray image model, the multimodal model improved the area under the curve value significantly from 0.951 to 0.975 (P=.004), the accuracy from 89.32% to 92.36% (P=.045), the sensitivity from 89.82% to 91.23% (P=.03), and the specificity from 88.64% to 93.92% (P=.008). Conclusions: While the multimodal model that fuses chest X-ray images and clinical data demonstrated superior performance compared to unimodal models and traditional methods, this study has several limitations. The dataset size may not be sufficient to capture the full diversity of the population. The retrospective nature of the study may introduce selection bias, and the lack of external validation limits the generalizability of the findings. Future studies should address these limitations by incorporating larger, more diverse datasets and conducting rigorous external validation to further establish the model's clinical use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".