Building a bone μCT images atlas for micro-architecture recognition

Trabecular bone and its micro-architecture are of prime importance for health. Changes of bone micro-architecture are linked to different pathological situations like osteoporosis and begin now to be understood. In a previous paper, we started to investigate the relationships between bone and vessels and we also proposed to build a Bone Atlas. This study describes how to proceed for the elaboration and use of such an atlas. Here, we restricted the Atlas to legs (tibia, femur) of rats in order to work with well known geometry of the bone micro-architecture. From only 6 acquired bone, 132 trabecular bone volumes were generated using simple mathematical morphology tools. The variety and veracity of the created micro-architecture volumes is presented in this paper. Medical application and final goal would be to determinate bone micro-architecture with some angulated radiographs (3 or 4) and to easily diagnose the bone status (healthy, pathological or healing bone...).