Automated measurement of bone-mineral-density (BMD) values of vertebral bones based on X-ray torso CT images

Bone is one of the most important anatomical structures in humans and osteoporosis is one of the major public health concerns in the world. Osteoporosis is a main target disease of bone, which can be detected by medical image techniques. The purpose of this study is to develop a fully automated computer scheme to measure bone-mineral-density (BMD) values for vertebral trabecular bones. This scheme will aid osteoporosis diagnosis performed using computer tomography (CT) images. This scheme includes the following processing steps: segmentation of the bone region, recognition of the skeletal structures and measurement of the BMD value in vertebral trabecular bone of each vertebral body. The proposed scheme was applied to 20 X-ray torso CT cases to measure the BMD values for vertebral trabecular bones. The experimental results show that the mean and standard deviation of the difference between the BMD values measured by using the proposed method and those measured using a manual segmentation method were 6.93 mg/cm³ and 6.82 mg/cm³ respectively. The accuracy of the proposed scheme satisfied the requirement for a computer-aided system used in osteoporosis diagnosis.