Automatic medical image analysis for measuring cortical bone porosity

Abstract

Cortical bone porosity is caused by osteoporosis, which causes bones to become weak and brittle and more likely to break. In this paper a method of automatic measurement of cortical bone porosity is proposed. This method uses medical images that were acquired using conventional computed tomography. The proposed method works by finding and defining the cortical bone region of interest on a medical image and measuring the cortical bone porosity inside this region, it also calculates the average cortical thickness.