Artificial intelligence–based diabetes risk prediction from longitudinal DXA bone measurements

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a serious global health concern that poses a significant threat to human life. Beyond its direct impact, diabetes substantially increases the risk of developing severe complications such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and musculoskeletal disorders like arthritis and osteoporosis. The field of diabetes classification has advanced significantly with the use of diverse data modalities and sophisticated tools to identify individuals or groups as diabetic. But the task of predicting diabetes prior to its onset, particularly through the use of longitudinal multi-modal data, remains relatively underexplored. To better understand the risk factors associated with diabetes development among Qatari adults, this longitudinal research aims to investigate dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA)-derived whole-body and regional bone composition measures as potential predictors of diabetes onset. We proposed a case-control retrospective study, with a total of 1,382 participants contains 725 male participants (cases: 146, control: 579) and 657 female participants (case: 133, control: 524). We excluded participants with incomplete data points. To handle class imbalance, we augmented our data using Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and SMOTEENN (SMOTE with Edited Nearest Neighbors), and to further investigated the association between bones data features and diabetes status, we employed ANOVA analytical method. For diabetes onset prediction, we employed both conventional and deep learning (DL) models to predict risk factors associated with diabetes in Qatari adults. We used SHAP and probabilistic methods to investigate the association of identified risk factors with diabetes. During experimental analysis, we found that bone mineral density (BMD), bone mineral contents (BMC) in the hip, femoral neck, troch area, and lumbar spine showed an upward trend in diabetic patients with [Formula: see text]. Meanwhile, we found that patients with abnormal glucose metabolism had increased wards BMD and BMC with low Z-score compared to healthy participants. Consequently, it shows that the diabetic group has superior bone health than the control group in the cohort, because they exhibit higher BMD, muscle mass, and bone area across most body regions. Moreover, in the age group distribution analysis, we found that the diabetes prediction rate was higher among healthy participants in the younger age group 20-40 years. But as the age range increased, the model predictions became more accurate for diabetic participants, especially in the older age group 56-69 years. It is also observed that male participants demonstrated a higher susceptibility to diabetes onset compared to female participants. Shallow models outperformed the DL models by presenting improved accuracy (91.08%), AUROC (96%), and recall values (91%). This pivotal approach utilizing DXA scans highlights significant potential for the rapid and minimally invasive early detection of diabetes.