Quantification of microarchitecture bone junctions based on a dual tree M-band wavelet decomposition

Osteoporosis shows itself both in a reduction of the bone mass and a degradation of the microarchitecture of the bone tissue. To this respect, radiographies of the calcaneus are used to analyze both the texture and the structure of the bone thanks to sophisticated image processing tools. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the number of junctions in the imaged microarchitecture. The first novelty of this paper is the evaluation of this number from a multiresolution representation resulting from Dual Tree M-band decompositions. Its appealing advantage is its great directional selectivity. The second contribution of our work relies on the statistical procedure we apply to separate between osteoporotic patients (OP) and control patients (CP). Classification and statistical tests conducted on a set of radiographies with their own ground truth corroborate the advantage of the proposed method.