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IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 2008 E91-D(4):1176-1184; doi:10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.4.1176
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Copyright © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

Regular Section -- Papers -- Biological Engineering

Noninvasive Femur Bone Volume Estimation Based on X-Ray Attenuation of a Single Radiographic Image and Medical Knowledge*

Supaporn KIATTISIN1 and Kosin CHAMNONGTHAI1

1 The authors are with the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Pracha-uthit Road, Bangkok 10140, Thailand. E-mail: supaporn_kai{at}utcc.ac.th


  Abstract

Bone Mineral Density (BMD) is an indicator of osteoporosis that is an increasingly serious disease, particularly for the elderly. To calculate BMD, we need to measure the volume of the femur in a noninvasive way. In this paper, we propose a noninvasive bone volume measurement method using x-ray attenuation on radiography and medical knowledge. The absolute thickness at one reference pixel and the relative thickness at all pixels of the bone in the x-ray image are used to calculate the volume and the BMD. First, the absolute bone thickness of one particular pixel is estimated by the known geometric shape of a specific bone part as medical knowledge. The relative bone thicknesses of all pixels are then calculated by x-ray attenuation of each pixel. Finally, given the absolute bone thickness of the reference pixel, the absolute bone thickness of all pixels is mapped. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments on 300 subjects were performed. We found that the method provides good estimations of real BMD values of femur bone. Estimates shows a high linear correlation of 0.96 between the volume Bone Mineral Density (vBMD) of CT-SCAN and computed vBMD (all P > 0.001). The BMD results reveal 3.23% difference in volume from the BMD of CT-SCAN.

Key Words: medical image processing, osteoporosis, bone mineral density, active contour model, volume BMD, linear attenuation coefficients

Manuscript received May 15, 2007. Manuscript revised October 18, 2007.

* This work was supported in part by a grant from the Ministry University Affair, Thailand.


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