ISCD Case of the Month

Title: June 2014 – Analyzing DXA’s with soft tissue artifacts

Submitted by Sarah Morgan, MD, RD, CCD, Larry Jankowski CBDT, Nancy Nunnally, RT, CBDT, and Leandria Burroughs RT, CBDT

The following lumbar spine DXA is from a 79 year old African American female, height 64”, weight 169 pounds, BMI = 29 sent to your DXA facility for evaluation of bone mineral density since she is estrogen deficient. She has no history of fractures. She is not able to tell you about any internal artifacts however, the scan below shows artifacts at L1 and L4. The technologist adds a note to the scan saying that no external artifacts were present during the scan. The scan was completed on a Hologic, Discovery W scanner running version 13.2 software.

QUESTION: How would you analyze this case? Would you omit any vertebral levels because of the artifacts in the soft tissue?

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Link original: http://www.iscd.org/education/case-of-the-month/