Bone health and osteoporosis research

Latest papers

• Self-supervised DXA representations encode multi-system disease risk, biological aging and heritability

  Gil Sasson, Zachary Levine, Smadar Shilo, Sarah Kohn, Guy Lutsker, Anastasia Godneva, Adam Gabet, David Krongauz, Adina Weinberger, Yann LeCun, Randall Balestriero, Eran Segal · 4 August 2026

  Whole-body dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scans are routinely acquired to measure bone density and regional body composition, leaving their spatial structure largely unused. Here, we show that self-supervised learning (SSL) can convert raw DXA images into representations of systemic health. …

• Fracture Risk Prediction in Adults Over 50 Years Old Using DXA and EHR: Comparison of Traditional and Machine Learning Models in Two Large Cohorts

  Jiahe Qian, Hao Dai, Kunyu Yu, Hexin Dong, Xing He, Erik A. Imel, Jiang Bian, Yifan Peng, Yi Liu · 3 August 2026

  Accurate fracture risk prediction is important for osteoporosis management, but commonly used clinical tools may not fully use information available in electronic health records (EHRs) and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) reports. We developed and externally validated time-to-event fracture pr…

• DXA-Derived Skeletal Phenotypes and Hip Fracture Risk: A Backdoor-Adjusted Causal Analysis

  Zixin Shi, Chen Zhao, Meiling Zhou, Kevin A. Maupin, Joyce H. Keyak, Nancy E. Lane, Kuan-Jui Su, Hui Shen, Hong-Wen Deng, Kui Zhang, Weihua Zhou · 3 June 2026

  Purpose: To compare dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA)-derived hip skeletal phenotypes in relation to hip fracture risk using prespecified confounder adjustment and to assess whether phenotypes ranked by their backdoor-adjusted average treatment effects (ATEs) improve risk stratification. Method…

• Transformer-Based Multi-Region Segmentation and Radiomic Analysis of HR-pQCT Imaging for Osteoporosis Classification

  Mohseu Rashid Subah, Mohammed Abdul Gani Zilani, Thomas L. Nickolas, Matthew R. Allen, Stuart J. Warden, Rachel K. Surowiec · 11 March 2026

  Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease typically diagnosed using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which quantifies areal bone mineral density but overlooks bone microarchitecture and surrounding soft tissues. High-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) enables three-dime…

• Improving Generalizability of Hip Fracture Risk Prediction via Domain Adaptation Across Multiple Cohorts

  Shuo Sun, Meiling Zhou, Chen Zhao, Joyce H. Keyak, Nancy E. Lane, Jeffrey D. Deng, Kuan-Jui Su, Hui Shen, Hong-Wen Deng, Kui Zhang, Weihua Zhou · 23 February 2026

  Clinical risk prediction models often fail to be generalized across cohorts because underlying data distributions differ by clinical site, region, demographics, and measurement protocols. This limitation is particularly pronounced in hip fracture risk prediction, where the performance of models trai…

• An AI-driven Assessment of Bone Density as a Biomarker Leading to the Aging Law

  Linmi Tao, Donglai Tao, Ruiyang Liu, Yu Cheng, Yuezhi Zhou, Li Huo, Zuoxiang He, Ti Jiang, Jingmao Cui, Yuanbiao Wang, Guilan Hu, Xiangsong Zhang, Yongwei Pan, Ye Yuan, Yun Liu · 22 December 2025

  As global population aging intensifies, there is growing interest in the study of biological age. Bones have long been used to evaluate biological age, and the decline in bone density with age is a well-recognized phenomenon in adults. However, the pattern of this decline remains controversial, maki…

• XAttn-BMD: Multimodal Deep Learning with Cross-Attention for Femoral Neck Bone Mineral Density Estimation

  Yilin Zhang, Leo D. Westbury, Elaine M. Dennison, Nicholas C. Harvey, Nicholas R. Fuggle, Rahman Attar · 19 November 2025

  Poor bone health is a significant public health concern, and low bone mineral density (BMD) leads to an increased fracture risk, a key feature of osteoporosis. We present XAttn-BMD (Cross-Attention BMD), a multimodal deep learning framework that predicts femoral neck BMD from hip X-ray images and st…

• PF-DAformer: Proximal Femur Segmentation via Domain Adaptive Transformer for Dual-Center QCT

  Rochak Dhakal, Chen Zhao, Zixin Shi, Joyce H. Keyak, Tadashi S. Kaneko, Kuan-Jui Su, Hui Shen, Hong-Wen Deng, Weihua Zhou · 3 November 2025

  Quantitative computed tomography (QCT) plays a crucial role in assessing bone strength and fracture risk by enabling volumetric analysis of bone density distribution in the proximal femur. However, deploying automated segmentation models in practice remains difficult because deep networks trained on…