Soft classification of trabeculae in trabecular bone

Classification of trabecular bone aims at discriminating different types of trabeculae. This paper proposes a method to perform a soft classification from binary 3D images. In a first step, the local structure tensor is used to estimate a membership degree of every voxel to three different classes, plate-, rod- and junction-like trabeculae. In a second step, the global structure tensor of plate-like trabeculae is compared with the local orientation of rod-like trabeculae in order to discriminate aligned from non-aligned rods. Results show that soft classification can be used for estimating independent parameters of trabecular bone for every different class, by using the classification as a weighting function.