Feasibility of micro-crack detection in human trabecular bone images from 3D synchrotron microtomography

Bone micro-cracks receive an increasing attention to explain bone quality. They have mainly been observed in 2D with microscopic techniques. In this paper, we propose a method based on 3D Synchrotron Radiation micro-CT to analyze micro-cracks in human trabecular bone samples. Samples were imaged with a voxel size of 1.4 mu m. Despite micro-cracks are visible, their automatic detection is challenging because of noise, artifacts, low-contrast, and partial volume effect. We propose a two-steps procedure, based on image enhancement and segmentation to address this problem. The method enables to get the 3D morphology of micro-cracks, shown for the first time with this precision. Future work Will be devoted to extract quantitative parameters on the crack morphology.