Pretreatment CT scans may contain clues about the risk of medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw
CT images taken before patients begin treatment with bone resorption inhibitors may contain measurable clues about who will later develop medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (MRONJ), according to a retrospective study by a researcher at Hiroshima University.
A study by Masaru Konishi from Hiroshima University suggests that pretreatment CT scans of the jaw could help predict the risk of medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (MRONJ). The research, published in Oral Diseases, utilized radiomics to analyze CT images taken before patients began taking bone resorption inhibitors, a common medication used to strengthen bones in individuals with osteoporosis or cancer-related bone metastasis.
By combining measurements from the mandibular region's cancellous and cortical bones, machine learning models were able to accurately distinguish between patients who later developed MRONJ and those who did not. The researchers found that including cortical bone in the analysis significantly improved the predictive power of the models, with the Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and Multilayer Perceptron models achieving AUC scores of 0.931, 0.917, and 0.921, respectively.
While the study demonstrates the potential of using pretreatment CT scans to identify patients at higher risk of MRONJ, it also highlights the need for further research to determine the specific characteristics of the images that are most predictive of the condition and to develop a predictive software tool for clinical use.
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