Quantification of bone remodeling in the proximity of implants

Abstract

In histomorphometrical investigations of bone tissue modeling around screw-shaped implants, the manual measurements of bone area and bone-implant contact length around the implant are time consuming and subjective. In this paper we propose an automatic image analysis method for such measurements. We evaluate different discriminant analysis methods and compare the automatic method with the manual one. The results show that the principal difference between the two methods occurs in length estimation, whereas the area measurement does not differ significantly. A major factor behind the dissimilarities in the results is believed to be misclassification of staining artifacts by the automatic method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.