In this month’s edition, we will focus on the automatic selection of a region of interest in CTAnalyzer. More specifically we will learn how to separate trabecular and cortical bone with an automated task list without manual input. This task list can be applied to all your samples, maximizing throughput.
Biomedical research on bone development and pathology often involves studying the bone phenotype of genetically modified mouse and rat strains. In practice, quantitative and qualitative analysis of long bone morphometry is subdivided into the analysis of the trabecular bone and the analysis of the cortical bone separately. To do so, one has to adequately set a region of interest corresponding to either the trabecular bone or the cortical bone. This region of interest selection is usually done manually for every individual bone. Furthermore, per bone multiple regions of interest have to be created on several slices throughout the 3D data volume, which turns it into a very time-consuming task. On top, manual selection of a region of interest is not always objective and thus has a low reproducibility.
With CTAnalyzer software, this selection of the trabecular and cortical region of interest can be done automatically by setting up a task list in custom processing. This way of region of interest selection is not only faster, it can also be performed in a batch and is more accurate compared to manual drawing, thereby increasing reproducibility and lowering variation.