Analysis of Bone Trabecular Patterns by Fractal Dimension

摘要

Fractal dimension is an index indicating how the structure of object is organized. As well as for the investigation of natural phenomena such as self-similarity, fractal dimension has been widely applied to the area of digital image processing such as texture classification and segmentation, scale factor determination, etc. In particular, some characteristics of two-dimensional images such as roughness, pattern formations, etc. can be analyzed using fractal dimension methods. In this sense, x-ray images can be analyzed using fractal dimension method because x-ray images show trabecular patterns that have pseudo self-similar structures. Showing microscopic structure of bones, trabecular patterns are closely related to the bone mineral density. However, though fractal dimension approaches have been variously attempted to the x-ray bone image processing so far, they are lack of providing clinically available results. In this paper we calculate fractal dimension in 91 distal radius X-ray images. The calculated fractal dimensions are correlated with the bone mineral density measured by a dual energy x-ray absorptiometry.