Strength through structure: visualization and local assessment of the trabecular bone structure

The visualization and subsequent assessment of the inner human bone structures play an important role for better understanding the disease- or drug-induced changes of bone in the context of osteoporosis giving prospect for better predictions of bone strength and thus of the fracture risk of osteoporotic patients. In this work, we show how the complex trabecular bone structure can be visualized using μCT imaging techniques at an isotropic resolution of 26 μm. We quantify these structures by calculating global and local topological and morphological measures, namely Minkowski functionals (MFs) and utilizing the (an-)isotropic scaling index method (SIM) and by deriving suitable texture measures based on MF and SIM. Using a sample of 151 specimens taken from human vertebrae in vitro, we correlate the texture measures with the mechanically measured maximum compressive strength (MCS), which quantifies the strength of the bone probe, by using Pearson's correlation coefficient. The structure parameters derived from the local measures yield good correlations with the bone strength as measured in mechanical tests. We investigate whether the performance of the texture measures depends on the MCS value by selecting different subsamples according to MCS. Considering the whole sample the results for the newly defined parameters are better than those obtained for the standard global histomorphometric parameters except for bone volume/total volume (BV/TV). If a subsample consisting only of weak bones is analysed, the local structural analysis leads to similar and even better correlations with MCS as compared to BV/TV. Thus, the MF and SIM yield additional information about the stability of the bone especially in the case of weak bones, which corroborates the hypothesis that the bone structure (and not only its mineral mass) constitutes an important component of bone stability.