# Bone health assessment through magnetic susceptibility mapping

> **NIH NIH F31** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 2024 · $18,376

## Abstract

Project Summary / Abstract
Osteoporosis (OP) is a degenerative skeletal disease which affects an estimated 200 million people worldwide
including 30% of all postmenopausal women in the United States and Europe. Hip fractures are the second most
common type of OP fracture and cause the greatest mortality and morbidity of all OP fractures, with the one-
year mortality rate reaching 20%. Clinical assessment of fracture risk is made via bone densitometric techniques
such as dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) or quantitative Computed Tomography (QCT), however, these
methods are poor predictors of hip fractures with sensitivities of less than 50%. There is thus a need to develop
adjunctive, novel, and accurate methods for non-invasively assessing bone quality to better inform clinical
treatment of osteoporosis and to enable new research discoveries in bone pathophysiology.
The proposed work builds on recent research conducted in the applicant’s lab based on magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) ultrashort echo time (UTE) pulse sequences for assessing bone material composition. I propose
to develop and validate a protocol for mapping bone susceptibility in the proximal femur in vivo. First, I will
evaluate the efficacy of regularization and deep learning methods for computing the ill-posed dipole inversion
through comparisons in cadaveric femora specimens with the gold standard susceptibility method, Calculation
of Susceptibility through Multiple Orientation Sampling. Next, I will investigate the extent to which magnetic
susceptibility is related to bone health through validation experiments with other imaging biomarkers and with
whole bone mechanical testing that mimics a sideways fall. Finally, I will assess the clinical feasibility of bone
susceptibility by tracking longitudinal changes following treatment in a small cohort of postmenopausal women.
Susceptibility measurement reproducibility and associations with DXA will also be quantified.
I anticipate that the results of this study can lead to a clinically feasible approach to measure bone health beyond
what is currently possible and could assist in future pharmaceutical or pathophysiological studies of bone
diseases.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10738296
- **Project number:** 5F31AR079925-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Brandon Clinton Jones
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $18,376
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-12-01 → 2024-02-27

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10738296

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10738296, Bone health assessment through magnetic susceptibility mapping (5F31AR079925-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10738296. Licensed CC0.

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