A Study on Vertebral Bone Strength by Micro-CT-Like Image

In this study, we expect to collect 10 sets of vertebrae (between T6 and L5) from 10 formalin-fixed human cadavers. The study protocol was reviewed and approved by the local Institutional Review Boards.The collected specimens subject to normalized Micro-CT and MSCT image scanning, image reconstruction using standard algorithms, and bone structure observation using bone algorithms to obtain high-quality, standardized axial images. We will use a conditional generation adversarial network-based image mapping technique to train the mapping model between MSCT images and Micro-CT images, find the correspondence between the image information contained in each of MSCT and Micro-CT, and finally obtain high-resolution micro-CT-like images. After obtaining the Micro-CT-like images of the samples, we will segment and annotate the images (including different structures such as vertebral body, bone cortex) and train the Teacher-Student \& U-Net++ deep learning architecture to achieve accurate segmentation of vertebral body regions, and obtain cancellous bone regions of interest. Based on this, we will analyze the bone structure characteristics of each spatial region in the images, including the thickness, spacing, orientation and distribution pattern of bone trabeculae and other indicators. Ultimately, we will cut a standardized cubic sample from the vertebral cancellous bone , obtain the bio-mechanical performance index of this cancellous bone sample by mechanical experiments, and analyze the correlation between bone structure of Micro-CT-like images and bio-mechanical index.