Analysis of the micro-structure of the human vertebral spongiosa with in vivo computed tomography

FELIX THOMSEN

Bahía Blanca

Jornada; Jornadas de Becarios, Tesistas y Proyectistas; 2016

Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica, UNS - CONICET

My mayor interest are fractal, scale space and fuzzy methods for the extraction of structural and texture parameters of bone tissue. My research focusses on developing algorithms for the computation of micro‐structural parameters from clinical CT. These can serve on the one hand to improve the extraction of micro structure information from in‐vivo scans and one the other hand to decrease the ray exposure to the patient. In a first step, I programmed a software ?Structural Insight? for processing CT volumes, which allows to perform all image processing steps with common micro structural parameters. The software was written in c++ with QT and the insight toolkit (ITK). We used this software in eight congress presentations or papers, three journal papers, one submitted and one drafted journal paper. The plate‐to rod model is an important structural parameter, it contains high correlation with failure load, hence is an important micro‐structural parameter for the prediction of fracture risk. We presented 2014 in Buenos Aires a new algorithm for obtaining the plate‐to‐rod ratio with 3D rose diagrams. Another approach used local fractal dimension based on the Hölder exponent. We presented an early version of this algorithm 2013 in Córdoba. A complete revised version will be submitted soon. Additionally to the main research topic of my PhD thesis on bone images, we established a cooperation with the University of Valladolid for the analysis of brain images with Alzheimer disease using magnetic resonance imaging. New inter‐voxel parameters were defined to improve the localization of pathologies (Neuroinformatics Ms ID: NEIN‐D‐15‐00078). Furthermore, a collaboration with the radiology of the University of Cologne has been established with the aim to analyze novel reconstruction parameters, which were recently developed by Siemens and Phillips to improve the visualization of CT volumes