Quantitative Comparison of 2 Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry Systems in Assessing Body Composition and Bone Mineral Measurements

Abstract

Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is widely used in body composition measurement and evaluation. Because of its numerous applications, the probability of instrument discrepancies has increased dramatically. This study quantitatively compares 2 different DXA systems. In this study, 96 subjects (60 female and 36 male, aged 19-82 years) were recruited and scanned using a General Electric Lunar iDXA and a Hologic Discovery scanner. Four measurements (percent fat, total mass, bone mineral density [BMD], and bone mineral content [BMC]) were quantitatively compared in the whole body and in specific anatomic regions (arms, legs, trunk, android, gynoid, head, ribs, and pelvis). A simple linear regression of each measurement was performed to examine the correlation between the 2 systems. Percent fat, total mass, BMC, and BMD were highly correlated between the 2 DXA systems, with correlation r values greater than 0.854 for both the whole body and the individual anatomic regions except for BMC and BMD in ribs. The high correlation between the 2 DXA systems with systematic differences enabled development of calibration equations for extending the multisystem measurements to advanced quantitative analyses.

Keywords: Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry; bone mineral content; bone mineral density; percent fat; quantitative comparison; total mass.