Discrete tomography from micro-CT data: application to the mouse trabecular bone structure
K. Joost Batenburg, Jan Sijbers · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
Discrete Tomography (DT) deals with the reconstruction of an image from its projections when this image is known to have only a small number of gray values. The knowledge of the discrete set of gray values can significantly reduce the number of projections required for a high-quality reconstruction. In this paper, a feasibility study is presented of the application of discrete tomography to micro-CT data from a mouse leg as to study the structural properties of the trabecular bone. The set of gray values is restricted to only three values, for the air background, the soft tissue background, and the trabecular bone structure. Reconstructions of the trabecular bone structure are usually obtained by computing a continuous reconstruction. To extract morphometric information from the reconstruction, the image must be segmented into the different tissue types, which is commonly done by thresholding. In the DT approach such a segmentation step is no longer necessary, as the reconstruction already contains a single gray value for each tissue type. Our results show that by using discrete tomography, a much better reconstruction of the trabecular bone structure can be obtained than by thresholding a continuous reconstruction from the same number of projections.