Automatic medical image analysis for measuring bone thickness and density

Abstract

Bone thickness and density decreases over time due to aging and such bone diseases as osteoporosis. In this paper a method is proposed to automatically measure changes in bone thickness and density by analyzing medical images, which were acquired by computer tomography at different time intervals. The proposed method automatically extracts the cortical bone and the trabecular bone from medical images and measures the average cortical bone thickness and trabecular bone density across several medical images. This method could also be used in studies, where it is necessary to analyze a large amount of medical images.