Show, Attend and Detect: Towards Fine-Grained Assessment of Abdominal Aortic Calcification on Vertebral Fracture Assessment Scans

Syed Zulqarnain Gilani, Naeha Sharif, David Suter, John T. Schousboe, Siobhan Reid, William D. Leslie, Joshua R. Lewis

Abstract: More than 55,000 people world-wide die from Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) each day. Calcification of the abdominal aorta is an established marker of asymptomatic CVD. It can be observed on scans taken for vertebral fracture assessment from Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry machines. Assessment of Abdominal Aortic Calcification (AAC) and timely intervention may help to reinforce public health messages around CVD risk factors and improve disease management, reducing the global health burden related to CVDs. Our research addresses this problem by proposing a novel and reliable framework for automated “fine-grained” assessment of AAC. Inspired by the vision-to-language models, our method performs sequential scoring of calcified lesions along the length of the abdominal aorta on DXA scans; mimicking the human scoring process.