Research on Anisotropic Fracture Mechanical Behavior of Cortical Bone with Combined Method of Fractal and Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix

The irregular fracture surface of cortical bone, which is caused by complex multilevel micro-nanostructure, reflects the mechanical properties and fracture mechanisms. It is of great significance to characterize some characteristic parameters from the fracture surfaces of bone. In this research, anisotropic fracture mechanical properties of bovine femoral cortical bone along transverse, longitudinal and radial direction are firstly obtained by three-point bend experiment. Then the fracture routes and fracture surfaces are observed by scanning electron microscope. The observation shows that the formed fracture surfaces, which are caused by different crack routes, are extremely rough and have complex textures. Lastly, the combined method of fractal and gray level co-occurrence matrix are adopted to describe the morphology of fracture surface of cortical bone objectively and quantitatively. It is shown that the fracture surface of cortical bone has obvious fractal characteristics and four statistical texture feature parameters (contrast,angular second moment, correlation and entropy) of GLCM of fracture surfaces can describe a certain fracture texture character. The relationship between the characteristic parameters and macroscopic mechanical properties are established. The quantitative analysis and automatic class identification for the fracture surfaces of cortical bone can be achieved.