Contribution for characterization of the bone texture, application on CT-scan images

Osteoporosis is a bone pathology inducing an increased fragility of the skeleton. With the lengthening of the duration of life, this pathology is going to concern an increasing population. A best knowledge of the quality of the bone structure can help at best prevention of the fracture risk. The bone mineral density is not the unique factor to determine the quality of the bone structure. The trabecular bone structure plays an important role on the strength of the bone. The ultimate objective of the planned work is to deliver a way for the characterization of the bone texture from the analysis of CT-scan images. This would allow an assistance to the diagnosis in the discrimination of healthy from pathologic patients. This paper emphasizes a preliminary study concerning the selection of some characterization tools of the bone texture. The selectivity is lead by the analysis of respective sensitivities of considered methods. We study a new method of texture analysis. This method is an original one. Called the “method of the three-dimensional relief”, it is related to the structural analysis and is based on the study of primitives