Texture image analysis for osteoporosis detection with morphological tools

The disease of osteoporosis shows itself both in a reduction of the bone mass and a degradation of the microarchitecture of the bone tissue. Radiological images of heel's bone are analyzed in order to extract informations about microarchitectural patterns. We first extract the gray-scale skeleton of the microstructures contained in the underlying images. More precisely, we apply the thinning procedure proposed by Mersal which preserves connectivity of the microarchitecture. Then, a post-processing of the resulting skeleton consists in detecting the points of intersection of the trabecular bones (multiple points). The modified skeleton can be considered as a powerful tool to extract discriminant features between Osteoporotic Patients (OP) and Control Patients (CP). For instance, computing the distance between two horizontal (respectively vertical) adjacent trabecular bones is a straightforward task once the multiple points are available. Statistical tests indicate that the proposed method is more suitable to discriminate between OP and CP than conventional methods based on binary skeleton.