Bone Imaging for Osteoporosis Assessment

Abstract

The ability to ‘see through’ the human body offered by modern medical imaging technologies greatly advanced medical diagnostics, as it is able to uncover abundant information from the hidden organs and tissues, which otherwise are not available to clinicians. Clinicians use medical images to identify abnormality in tissues to diagnose diseases such as tumor and cancer, and to monitor effectiveness of treatments. Medical imaging plays important role in making effective decisions by clinicians. Medical images also provide authentic information to construct accurate and reliable biomechanical models of human body [104, 105, 136–147]. The four imaging modalities that have been adopted to assess bone quantity and quality are dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), quantitative computed tomography (QCT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasonography (US) [148–152]. Currently, DXA and QCT are the most commonly used ones in either clinic or research. The work principles of the two modalities are briefly introduced in the following sections. As the principles are quite complicated [153, 154], in the following introduction we mainly focus on how bone tissue mass and geometry information are captured by medical imaging and how they are used in assessment of bone quantity and quality, as these information are necessary to understand the biomechanical models described later in this book.