Al Predicts Possible Vertebra Bone Fractures.

• Position: SPINAL COLUMN

As medicine continues to embrace machine learning, a study suggests how scientists might use artificial intelligence to predict how cancer may affect the probability of fractures along the spinal column.

In the U.S., more than 1,600,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed every year, and about 10% of those patients experience spinal metastasis--when disease spreads from other places in the body to the spine. One of the biggest clinical concerns patients face is the risk of spinal fractures due to these tumors, which can lead to severe pain and spinal instability.

"Spinal fracture increases the risk of patient death by about 15%," says Soheil Soghrati, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State University. "By predicting the outcome of these fractures, our research offers medical experts the opportunity to design better treatment strategies and help patients make better-informed decisions."

Soghrati's study, published in the Internationa! Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, describes how researchers trained an Al-assisted framework called FieconGAN to create a...