Through its linked third party Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli (IOR), UNIBO has access to over 4000 CT scans of the thigh region, originally collected to provide CT-based surgical planning of a total hip replacement procedure, but under an informed consent that included also secondary use for research.
IOR and regional ethical committee have granted permission to publicly share a subgroup (max 5-10%) of the CT scans after full and irreversible anonymization.
In addition, some of the subjects experienced a proximal femur fracture within the next 5 years, so the CT scan cohort can be used as a validation dataset for prospective patient-specific femur fracture risk estimation models.
UNIBO will also plan to explore the generation of synthetic data collections, specifically toward the generation of virtual cohorts for phase III In Silico Trials (with over 1000 virtual patients).
