IODA® has been developed by a team of shoulder surgeons and radiologists, with a specific focus on the existing literature concerning shoulder instability and bone defects. It was a firm belief of the team that the systematic assessment of existing literature is paramount to create and develop a software that was scientifically valid and clinically useful.
Therefore, a focused effort was paid to conceive and carry out clinical studies to assess the software performance, publishing results, getting new insides from study outcomes and further implement the software.
From the original description of glenoid bone loss (GBL) of the dislocated shoulder, attention has been placed on an accurate measurement of glenoid bone loss when determining the more suitable surgical intervention for the patient, either at first episode or with recurrent instability. Anterior GBL has been noted in up to 41% of patients after an initial dislocation and in 90% of patients with recurrent instability.
Many different measurement methods for GBL have been advocated in available literature and by corporate research, although no proposed technique is recognized to be superior to others and of easy routinary adoption. Indeed, the PICO method (the present gold standard for measurement) is carried out by dedicated radiologists and not by surgeons themselves.
The linear methods have been reported to often overestimate the defect, have low accuracy, as they do not account for the exact site of the defect (upper or lower location). The surface area methods are considered more reliable but still inaccurate, due to lack of precision of the best-fitting circle positioning and are affected by a large inter-observer and intra-observer variability.
The purpose of IODA for joints is to develop and validate an automated software properly developed to improve Glenoid Bone Loss estimation (IODA® shoulder) using a 3D imaging processing powered by an AI-based image segmentation.