October - December 2015: Collaboration in the project: "Quantitative high resolution cone beam CT for assessment of bone and joint health" at Johns Hopkins University

Eugenio Marinetto will stay from 1 October to 15 December 2015 collaborating on the project: "Quantitative high resolution cone beam CT for assessment of bone and joint health" at Johns Hopkins University.

The clinical problem is computing the metrics of trabecular bone structure using the extremities CBCT. Usually, this is done with micro-CT and there is some consensus about what the relevant metrics are (trabecular thickness, structural model index, bone volume etc), but achieving a reliable measurement of those quantities with CT in human patients is difficult if not impossible because of low spatial resolution. CBCT has much better resolution and we can push it even further, so it is promising as a tool for in-vivo bone morphometrics - which is unique and likely of big impact for things like arthritis and osteoporosis. The challenge is  to implement and validate all those metrics of bone architecture - both the "conventional" ones (same as the ones used in micro-CT) and also some novel approaches (based mainly on clustering/classification/texture analysis - likely more reliable than the conventional metrics when resolution is limited). For conventional metrics, there are software packages that compute them (e.g. ImageJ has a plugin), but ISTAR lab want to have their own implementation so they can easily run large-scale studies. To validate, lab needs to compare with micro-CT and conventional CT, which will require registration across the three modalities and between images "in tissue" (in-situ) and images of excised samples (ex-situ). 

Wojciech Zbijewski, PhD. is the IP of the project.