Vertebral Stiffness Measured via DTS-DVC Correlates with Micro-CT

Congratulations to Dan Oravec and his colleagues on their recent publication entitled, “Vertebral Stiffness Measured Via Tomosynthesis-Based Digital Volume Correlation is Strongly Correlated with Reference Values from Micro-CT-Based DVC”. The article was published in Medical Engineering and Physics and the abstract is included below.

Abstract: Digital tomosynthesis (DTS) is a clinically available modality that allows imaging of a patient’s spine in supine and standing positions. The purpose of this study was to establish the extent to which vertebral displacement and stiffness derived from DTS-based digital volume correlation (DTS-DVC) are correlated with those from a reference method, i.e., microcomputed tomography-based DVC ( μCT-DVC). T11 verte- bral bodies from 11 cadaveric donors were DTS imaged twice in a nonloaded state and once under a fixed load level approximating upper body weight. The same vertebrae were μCT imaged in nonloaded and loaded states (40 μm voxel size). Vertebral displacements were calculated at each voxel using DVC with pairs of nonloaded and loaded images, from which endplate-to-endplate axial displacement (D DVC ) and vertebral stiffness (S DVC ) were calculated. Both D DVC and S DVC demonstrated strong positive correlations between DTS-DVC and μCT-DVC, with correlations being stronger when vertebral displacement was cal- culated using the median (R2 = 0.80; p < 0.0002 and R2 = 0.93; p < 0.0001, respectively) rather than average displacement (R2 = 0.63; p < 0.004 and R2 = 0.69; p < 0.002, respectively). In conclusion, the demonstrated relationship of DTS-DVC with the μCT standard supports further development of a biomechanics-based clinical assessment of vertebral bone quality using the DTS-DVC technique.