The osteoporotic fractures are due to alteration of trabecular and/or cortical bone. As the trabecular bone analysis do not require images with high resolution, it has been largely investigated contrary to the cortical bone for which there are few studies. The porosity of the cortical bone is depending on canal network and the bone remodeling leads to a coalescence process of canals which progressively involve the degradation of bone quality. Most of parameters to characterize the canal network of cortical bone were derived from the trabecular bone micro-architecture parameters and do not characterize the canals locally for which the changes of shape and regularity are in relation to the remodelling intensity. In this preliminary study, new tri-dimensional (3D) features of shape and surface at the canal level are presented to better characterize the remodeling processes. For that, we used 16 cortical bone samples from human femurs. Three D images at 7.5 µm3 of resolution were obtained by synchrotron radiation micro-CT (SR micro-CT) used as the reference method comparatively to desktop micro-CT usually used for bone exploration. Therefore, our goal is to compare these both modalities. Usual and global parameters about canal volume, surface, diameter, spacing and number derived from the trabecular bone analysis were performed. Two parameters were developed to better describe the complexity of the structure: one describing the shape of the canals Ca.s and one the regularity surface Ca.r. There are significant changes in shape and surface parameters on D micro-CT compared with those observed by the reference SR micro-CT whereas there was no difference for global parameters. Consequently, only high image quality, such as SR micro-CT modality could be used to characterize the cortical degradation process at a local level.
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