Relationships between cortical bone quality biomarkers: Stiffness, toughness, microstructure, mineralization, cross-links and collagen

摘要

Bone quality encompasses bone properties that contribute to fracture risk, such as bone stiffness, microstructure, matrix constituents or tissue material properties. These aspects cannot be quantified in-vivo except for stiffness, a surrogate biomarker of strength, which can be assessed using quantitative ultrasound techniques. To better predict bone fracture risk, investigating the relationships between stiffness and other bone quality factors is important. Toward this goal, our group adapted resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) to precisely measure the whole set of stiffness coefficients of cortical bone by improving the signal processing and automatizing the inversion procedure based on a Bayesian framework. In this work, we present the relationships between bone quality biomarkers including stiffness, fracture toughness, microstructure, mineralization, cross-links and collagen.