Segmentation of remodelling regions in bone micro-CT images: Influence of denoising

Synchrotron radiation 3D micro-CT providing quantitative images of bone samples opens new perspectives for assessing bone metabolism. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of segmenting remodeling regions from such images acquired at a spatial resolution of 10 μm. Segmenting remodeling regions within the bone phase is not an easy task. Although remodeling regions can be visually distinguished, their contrast with respect to bone may be very weak and close to the standard deviation of noise. We propose a segmentation scheme based on a customized region growing associated to a denoising process. We consider denoising methods based on wavelets and anisotropic diffusion. Our results show that a corrupted image can be well restored, essentially without compromising image resolution. Thus the segmentation of correct remodeling zones in the bone is more realistic on the denoised images.