Determination of bone volume porosity based on histograms of the mCT scans

Abstract

The new method is proposed in the paper for determination of volume porosity of bone tissue based on histograms of 3D mCT scans and also precise defi nition of the threshold value of relative density preserving calculated volume porosity during the reconstruction of the binary image of sample. In this method the normed histogram is considered as a probability distribution of relative mass density in the bone sample. It was shown that the normed histograms of increasing 3D sample are convergent to the limit curve which can be interpreted as a representative histogram of given sample. The limit histograms have been used to determine: the distributions of relative densities in the sets of voxels of pore and skeleton type and their characteristics, the volume porosities of both samples and thresholds values of their binarisation