Mohsen Salimi: Non-Contrast Chest CT as a Biomarker for Mild-to-Moderate Anemia
Mohsen Salimi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Research Center of Thoracic Oncology, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent article he and his colleagues co-authored, published in Thrombosis Research, adding:
”I’m pleased to share the publication of our new research article in Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology:
‘CT attenuation as a biomarker of mild-to-moderate anemia: development of a non-contrast chest CT prediction model.’
In this study, we investigated whether routinely acquired non-contrast chest CT can provide useful imaging clues for identifying mild-to-moderate anemia.
We evaluated both visual findings, including the aortic ring sign and interventricular septum sign, and quantitative blood attenuation measurements in the left ventricular cavity and descending aorta.
The underlying concept is that lower hemoglobin concentration reduces the X-ray attenuation of circulating blood, which can be reflected in CT images.
Among 141 adult patients, both qualitative signs were significantly more frequent in patients with anemia, while CT attenuation was significantly lower in the left ventricle and descending aorta.
The quantitative parameters demonstrated strong diagnostic performance, with AUCs of 0.903 for left ventricular attenuation and 0.917 for descending aortic attenuation.
We then developed a combined prediction model incorporating sex, the interventricular septum sign, and descending aortic attenuation.
The model achieved an AUC of 0.980 in the training cohort and 0.953 in the validation cohort, with consistent performance on additional nested cross-validation.
Our findings suggest that non-contrast chest CT may contain clinically relevant information about hemoglobin status, even when the scan was originally obtained for another indication.
Rather than replacing laboratory testing, this approach could potentially help flag unsuspected mild-to-moderate anemia and prompt confirmatory blood testing.
This work adds to the growing field of opportunistic imaging biomarkers, where routinely acquired medical images can provide information beyond their original diagnostic purpose.”
Title: CT attenuation as a biomarker of mild-to-moderate anemia: development of a non-contrast chest CT prediction model
Authors: Parisa Pishdad, Mitra Ataee Kachuee, Rezvan Ravanfar Haghighi, Pouria Vadipour, Mohsen Salimi
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