The condition known as abdominal aortic calcification, or AAC, is a calcification that can accumulate within the abdominal aorta's walls and indicates your chance of experiencing heart attacks and strokes, among other cardiovascular disease-related events.
It also forecasts your chance of late-life dementia, fractures, and falls.
Conveniently, AAC may be found with standard bone density machine scans that are used to identify osteoporosis.
Nevertheless, the photographs must be analyzed by highly skilled professional readers, a task that can take five to fifteen minutes each image.
However, scientists from the Schools of Science and Medicine and Health Sciences at Edith Cowan University (ECU) have worked together to create software that analyzes scans much, much more quickly—roughly 60,000 pictures in a single day.
Joshua Lewis, an associate professor and researcher at the Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow, stated that this notable increase in effectiveness is essential for the general use of AAC in research as well as for preventing health issues in the future.
"Since these images and automated ratings can be rapidly and easily acquired at the time of bone density evaluation, this may lead to new approaches in the future for early cardiovascular disease diagnosis and disease monitoring during routine clinical practice," he stated.
Saving a LOT of time
The Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew SeniorLife Harvard Medical School, the University of Washington, the University of Minnesota, Southampton, the University of Manitoba, and ECU collaborated internationally to produce the results. A truly global, multidisciplinary endeavor.
The study is the largest of its type, was conducted using the most widely used versions of bone density machines, and is the first to be evaluated in an actual context using pictures obtained during normal bone density testing, even though the algorithm used to measure AAC from these images is not the first.
Over five thousand photos were examined by professionals and the team's software.
Eighty percent of the time, the expert and software came at the same judgment on the degree of AAC (low, moderate, or high) after comparing the data. This is a respectable percentage considering that the program was in its first form.
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