International audienceIn order to prevent bone fractures due to disease and ageing of the population, and to detect problems while still in their early stages, 3D bone micro architecture needs to be investigated and characterized. Here, we have developed various image processing and simulation techniques to investigate bone micro architecture and its mechanical stiffness. We have evaluated morphological, topological and mechanical bone features using artificial intelligence methods. A clinical study is carried out on two populations of arthritic and osteoporotic bone samples. The performances of Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) in classifying the different samples have been compared. Results show that the best separation success (100 %) is achieved with Genetic Algorithm

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The clinical process used to screen osteoporosis is the Bone Mineral Density (BMD). Since this density measurement does not cover the entire diagnosis range, work is being carried out on the segmentation of the bone and other complex porous media to provide quantitative information about their microarchitecture. Two shape classification techniques have been recently proposed in the literature. In this paper we compare these different methods and propose a new original rod/plate classification technique. The efficiency of the 3 processes is then studied on test vectors composed of both rods and plates, then applied on real trabecular bone samples. Results of this study emphasize the pros and cons of the 2 published techniques, and discuss the improvements of the new region-growth-based method. Finally, the interest of such a tool in osteoporosis screening is discussed.

Abstract-This work aims to estimate the apparent Young's modulus of real human trabecular bones using a numerical micro-macro approach. Cylindrical specimens of trabecular bone were extracted from human femur heads, cleaned and scanned using a SkyScan-1072 micro-computed tomography system. 3D volumetric tetrahedral grids were generated from the exploitation of the reconstructed images using original meshing techniques. Numerical compressive tests were simulated, assuming isotropic tissue Young's modulus for all elements. The large size of the volumes implies grids with a high number of nodes, which required the use of a large number of parallel processors in order to perform the finite element calculations. Numerical Young's moduli varied between 1300 MPa and 1600 MPa, with a good agreement with experiments.