ASSESSMENT AND CLASSIFICATION OF MECHANICAL STRENGTH COMPONENTS OF HUMAN FEMUR TRABECULAR BONE USING DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING AND NEURAL NETWORKS

In this work, the assessment of the mechanical strength of human femur trabecular bone and its classification into normal or abnormal are carried out using digital image processing and neural networks. The mechanical strength components of femur trabeculae, such as primary compressive (PC), primary tensile (PT), secondary tensile (ST), and Ward's triangle (WT), are delineated by the semiautomatic image processing procedure from the planar radiographic images (N = 90) of subjects that are acquired under controlled clinical settings. Parameters such as apparent mineralization and total area of the individual mechanical strength components are calculated for normal and abnormal samples. The data are trained with neural networks and validated. The classifications are carried out using feed-forward neural networks trained with the standard backpropagation algorithm. The abnormal and normal outputs are validated by sensitivity and specificity measurements. The observation shows that the investigation of bone mechanical strength at the various strength components is useful in classifying normal and abnormal human femur trabeculae from conventional radiographs. Furthermore, the results confirm the effectiveness of the neural network–based classification of femur trabeculae into normal and abnormal conditions. The sensitivity and specificity are found to be 100% and 80%, respectively. In this paper, the methodology, data collection procedures, and neural network–based analysis and results are discussed in detail.