Methods for quantitative characterization of bone injury from computed-tomography images

摘要

Computed tomography (CT) images can potentially provide insights into bone structure for diagnosis of disordersand diseases. However, evaluation of trabecular bone structure and whole bone shape is often qualitative or semiquantitative.This limits inter-study comparisons and the ability to detect subtle bone quality variations duringearly disease onset or in response to new treatments. In this work, we enable quantitative characterization ofbone diseases through bone morphometry, texture analysis, and shape analysis methods.The potential of our analysis methods to identify the impact of hemophilia is validated in a mouse femurwound model. In our results, shape localizes and characterizes the formation of spurious bone, and our textureand bone morphometry analysis results provide extra information about the composition of that bone. Someof our one-dimensional (1D) textural features were able to significantly differentiate our injured femurs fromour healthy femurs, even with this small sample size demonstrating the potential of the proposed analysisframework. While trabecular bone morphometrics have been a pillar in 3D microCT bone research for decades,the proposed analysis framework augments how we define and understand phenotypical presentation of bonedisease. The contributed open source software is exposed to the medical image analysis community through 3DSlicer extensions to ensure both robustness and reproducibility.