Trabecular thickness measurement in cancellous bones: postmortem rat studies with the zoom-in micro-tomography technique.
Using the cross-sectional images taken with the zoom-in micro-tomography technique, we measured trabecular thicknesses of femur bones in postmortem rats. Since the zoom-in micro-tomography technique is capable of high resolution imaging of a small local region inside a large subject, we were able to measure the trabecular thickness without extracting bone samples from the rats. For the zoom-in micro-tomography, we used a micro-tomography system consisting of a micro-focus x-ray source, a 1248 x 1248 flat-panel x-ray detector and a precision scan mechanism. To compensate for the limited spatial resolution in the zoom-in micro-tomography images, we used the fuzzy distance transform for the calculation of the trabecular thickness. To validate the trabecular thickness measurement with the zoom-in micro-tomography images, we compared the measurement results with those obtained from the conventional micro-tomography images of the extracted bone samples. The difference between the two types of measurement results was less than 2.5%.
Cho
Myung Hye
MH
Deptartment of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee Univeristy, Kiheung, Yongin, Kyungki, Korea.
Chun
In Kon
IK
Lee
Sang Chul
SC
Cho
Min Hyoung
MH
Lee
Soo Yeol
SY
D000818:Animals; D005269:Femur / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed / Q000379:methods*