Spine age derived from DXA vertebral fracture assessment images predicts incident fractures and mortality: the Manitoba Bone Mineral Density Registry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biological age may better predict health outcomes than chronological age by capturing individual heterogeneity in aging. We investigated whether accelerated spine aging, estimated from DXA vertebral fracture assessment (VFA) using deep learning, predicts fracture and mortality independently of age, vertebral fracture (VF), and BMD. A convolutional neural network model to estimate age from lateral spine radiographs was trained in a Korean cohort (VERTE-X, n = 10 341). Among 27 601 adults aged ≥50 who underwent DXA VFA in Manitoba, Canada (2010-2023), the pre-trained model was fine-tuned to DXA VFA images using 20% randomly sampled subset. Among remaining 80% set, test set included 8810 individuals who completed DXA before 2017 as the outcomes were ascertained through 2018. Predicted spine age difference (PAD = spine age-chronological age) was calculated in the test set. During a mean follow-up of 3.9 yr, 899 incident fractures and 969 deaths occurred. Spine age positively correlated with chronological age (r = 0.89), with a mean difference of 0.0 yr (SD = 3.4). Factors associated with higher PAD include VFs (+1.02 yr), nonvertebral fracture history (+0.22), generalized spine structural artifacts (+1.45), smoking (+1.20), and lower FN BMD (+0.60 per T-score decrement), collectively explaining 66% of PAD variance. Each SD increase in PAD was associated with higher risk of any (adjusted hazard ratio = 1.11), nonvertebral (1.10), major osteoporotic (1.12), and hip fracture (1.25), and mortality (1.12), independent of covariates (all p < .05). In summary, accelerated spine aging detected from DXA VFA predicts fracture and mortality risk independently of age, clinical risk factors, VF, spine structural artifacts, and BMD in individuals at high risk of fracture, supporting its potential to enhance fracture risk assessment.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".