Texture image analysis for osteoporosis detection with morphological tools

Abstract

Osteoporosis is due to the following two phenomena: a reduction bone mass and a degradation of the microarchitecture of bone tissue. In this paper, we propose a method for extracting morphological information enabling the description of bone structure from radiological images of the calcaneus. Our main contribution relies on the fact that we provide bone descriptors close to classical 3D-morphological bone parameters. The first step of the proposed method consists in extracting the grey-scale skeleton of the microstructures contained in the underlying images. After an appropriate processing, the resulting skeleton provides discriminant features between osteoporotic patients and control patients. Statistical tests corroborate this discrimination property. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.