Analysing μCT images of bone specimen with Wavelets and Scaling Indices: Which texture measure does better depict the trabecular bone structure?

The visualisation and subsequent quantification of the inner bone structure plays an important role for better understanding the disease- or drug-induced changes of the bone in the context of osteoporosis. Scaling indices (SIM) are well suited to quantify these structures on a local level, especially to discriminate between plate-like and rod-like structural elements. Local filters based on wavelets (WVL) are a standard technique in texture analysis. So far, they are mainly used for two-dimensional image data sets. Here we extend the formalism of the spherical Mexican hat wavelets to the analysis of three-dimensional tomographic images and evaluate its performance in comparison with scaling indices, histomorphometric measures and BMD. μCT images with isotropic resolution of 30 × 30 &timesl 30 μm of a sample of 19 trabecular bone specimen of human thoracic vertebrae were acquired. In addition, the bone mineral density was measured by QCT. The maximum compressive strength (MCS) was determined in a biomechanical test. Some wavelet-based as well as all scaling index- based texture measures show a significantly higher correlation with MCS (WVL: ρ²=0.54, SIM: ρ²=0.53-0.56) than BMD (ρ²=0.46), where we find slightly better correlations for SIM than for WVL. The SIM and WVL results are comparable but not better to those obtained with histomorphometric measures (BV/TV: ρ²=0.45, Tr. N.: ρ²=0.67, Tr.Sp.: ρ²=0.67). In conclusion, WVL and SIM techniques can successfully be applied to μCT image data. Since the two measures characterize the image structures on a local scale, they offer the possibility to directly identify and discriminate rods and sheets of the trabecular structure. This property may give new insights about the bone constituents responsible for the mechanical strength.