Micro-CT for bone structural analysis has progressed from an in-vitro laboratory technique to devices for in-vivo assessment of small animals and the peripheral human skeleton. Currently, topological parameters of bone architecture are the primary goals of analysis. Additional measurement of the density or degree of mineralization (DMB) of trabecular and cortical bone at the microscopic level is desirable to study effects of disease and treatment progress. This information is not commonly extracted because of the challenges of accurate measurement and calibration at the tissue level. To assess the accuracy of micro-CT DMB measurements in a realistic but controlled situation, we prepared bone-mimicking watery solutions at concentrations of 100 to 600 mg/cm3 K2PO4H and scanned them with micro-CT, both in glass vials and microcapillary tubes with inner diameters of 50, 100 and 150 mm to simulate trabecular thickness. Values of the linear attenuation coefficients m in the reconstructed image are commonly affected by beam hardening effects for larger samples and by partial volume effects for small volumes. We implemented an iterative reconstruction technique to reduce beam hardening. Partial voluming was sought to be reduced by excluding voxels near the tube wall. With these two measures, improvement on the constancy of the reconstructed voxel values and linearity with solution concentration could be observed to over 90% accuracy. However, since the expected change in real bone is small more measurements are needed to confirm that micro-CT can indeed be adapted to assess bone mineralization at the tissue level.

Date Published: 7 September 2006
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 6318, Developments in X-Ray Tomography V, 631808 (7 September 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.681939

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6318:
Developments in X-Ray Tomography V
Ulrich Bonse, Editor(s)