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.
©2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. Rodrigo Moreno, Magnus Borga and Örjan Smedby, Soft Classification of trabeculae in Trabecular Bone, 2011, IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, 1641-1644.