Graph-based multi-scale analysis of plates and rods in human trabecular bone

Abstract

Trabecular bone is made of a complex network of plate and rod structures, the proportion of which evolves with age or disease. Thus the identification of trabecular plates and rods is important in understanding bone fragility. We propose a novel approach based on 3D multi-scale adjacency graph analysis of high resolution 3D tomographic images of bone structures. The purpose of this new method is to classify each voxel of the 3D images in two classes : plate and rod voxels. We show that the use of a multi-scale framework is very efficient at detecting rods with different sizes. We present applications of our method to both synthetic images and experimental bone synchrotron radiation micro-CT images.