Structural Insight is a software for the analysis of 3D quantitative computed
tomography volumes with a special weight for the analysis of the trabecular microstructure of human vertebrae.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Delrieux, Claudio

Glüer, Claus-Christian

Peña, Jaime

Thomsen, Felix

English

SEDICI - Repositorio de la UNLP

Structural Insight v3: A stand-alone program for micro 
structural analysis of computed tomography volumes  
Felix Thomsen1, Jaime Peña2, Claudio Delrieux1, Claus-Christian Glüer2 
1Computer Science Lab, University of the South, Avenida Alem 1253, 8000 Bahía Blanca, 
Argentina, 2 Biomedical Imaging, University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein, Am Botanischen 
Garten 14, 24118 Kiel, Germany 
{Felix.Thomsen,CAD}@uns.edu.ar, {Jaime.Pena,CCG}@rad.uni-kiel.de  
Abstract. Structural Insight is a software for the analysis of 3D quantitative computed 
tomography volumes with a special weight for the analysis of the trabecular micro-
structure of human vertebrae. The software provides functionality to visually inspect, 
calibrate, segment, register and analyze the 3D volumetric data with standard struc-
tural parameters. The current version 3 includes the entire functionality of the two 
former versions (v1 and v2) from 2004 and 2010 respectively. The mayor changes 
between version 2 and 3 are the modular interior program structure, new and innova-
tive functions of visualization and analysis, less hardware restrictions and an adapted 
user-friendly appearance. The software is written in c++, combined with QT and the 
insight visualization toolkit ITK and contains more than 10k lines of code (without 
code of the graphical user interface). Supported import and export formats are 
DICOM, GIPL, VTK and two proprietary formats BST (from version 1) and XML 
(from version 2), screenshots are stored as BMP or PNG. Various definitions of e.g. 
the calibration phantoms, particular presets, preferences for the registration, and visu-
alization (colormaps etc.) are loaded at runtime, thus can be adapted by the user with-
out the need of re-compiling the code. The software supports batch analysis and pro-
vides supervised makros for monotonic tasks or to learn the program. Two segmenta-
tion modes are implemented: a non-rigid registration with a snake model segments an 
entire vertebra into cortex and spongiosa and the geometric segmentation segments 
manually placed ellipsoids, boxes or pacman-shaped volumes of interest. The 3D 
visualization methods include slice-, mean-, maximum-,depth-field- projection and 
ray casting. Various image processing functions are implemented: crop, resample, 
rotate, blur, morphological filtering and inversion. Registration can be performed via 
rotation and translation of either the image data or the data of the segmentation using 
one of four interpolators (nearest neighbor, linear, b-spline and windowed sinc). The 
user can adapt settings for either high precision or low run-time. Implemented analy-
sis functions contain most standard methods using the voxel-counting, marching cu-
bes-, distance transform-, direct secant- and run-length method, besides experimental-
ly functions for the computation of gray scale texture information. The analysis can 
be restricted to certain volumes-of-interest and computation of all scans of a entire 
study can executed at once. Results are visualized on a table and can be exported in 
csv-, txt- or xml-format. Time-consuming features (e.g. pyramid-based rendering) are 
realized by threads, thus allowing smooth user feeling. The program was used in vari-
ous presentations and journal publications. 
 
Keywords. Radiology Software, Quantitative Computed Tomography, Micro-
structural parameters 
CAIS 2016, 7º Congreso Argentino de Informática y Salud
45JAIIO - CAIS 2016 - ISSN: 2451-7607 - Página 199


Structural Insight v3: A stand-alone program for micro structural analysis of computed tomography volumes

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Structural Insight v3: A stand-alone program for micro structural analysis of computed tomography volumes

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