Patient-specific DXA bone mineral density inaccuracies: Quantitative effects of nonuniform extraosseous fat distributions

Nonuniform extraosseous fat is shown to raise the magnitude of inaccuracies in DXA in vivo BMD measurements into the range of 20-50% in clinically relevant cases. Hence, DXA-based bone fragility diagnoses/prognoses and evaluations of bone responsiveness to treatment can be unreliable. Patient-specific DXA in vivo bone mineral areal density (BMD) measurements have been demonstrated to be inherently inaccurate even when extraosseous fat (F) and lean muscle tissue (L) are uniformly distributed throughout the scan region of interest (ROI). The present work extends these investigations to quantitative evaluation of the extent to which clinically realistic soft tissue inhomogeneities external to the bone within the DXA scan ROI affect patient-specific in vivo BMD measurement inaccuracies. The results are particularly relevant to patient-specific lumbar vertebral and proximal femoral sites. Norland, Hologic, and Lunar DXA scans and corresponding DXA simulation studies of the same set of 225 different phantom arrays were carried out. The phantoms were specially fabricated absorptiometric replications of bone mineral material (B), red marrow (RM), and yellow marrow (YM) mixtures, and extraosseous F and L combinations spanning the anthropometric ranges encountered clinically.