Strong correlation between phantomless and inline phantom-based densitometric calibration of vertebral properties from CT scans of healthy volunteers

Phantom calibration is currently the gold standard for calibrating CT scans and for calculating material properties of dense tissues for computational models. However, in Oncology departments and low-resource settings, it is not routine to include a calibration phantom within the scanning protocol. Therefore, retrospective scan datasets are challenging to calibrate for biomechanical investigations, precluding detailed measurements of material and mechanical properties. In this study, we compared the results from a phantomless calibration technique, where the density within each scan was independently calibrated based on known tissue densities captured within each scan (e.g., air), with those from a traditional inline phantom calibration. To do so we used scans from a cohort of healthy volunteers from the control arm of a clinical trial dataset (ANTELOPE) in which inline calibration phantoms were included. We found that, when selecting air and the aorta as regions for calibration within individual CT scans, a strong individual-specific correlation existed between bone mineral density measured in the phantomless and phantom calibrations. This indicates that the phantomless calibration method can be a useful and reliable tool for quantifying the densitometric material properties of healthy human vertebrae, and provides the opportunity for further analysis of spinal CT scans in either retrospective datasets or in low-resource clinical settings.