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Quantifying intracortical bone microstructure: A critical appraisal of 2D and 3D approaches for assessing vascular canals and osteocyte lacunae
- Source :
- Journal of Anatomy
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- Wiley, 2020.
-
Abstract
- Describing and quantifying vascular canal orientation and volume of osteocyte lacunae in bone is important in studies of bone growth, mechanics, health and disease. It is also an important element in analysing fossil bone in palaeohistology, key to understanding the growth, life, and death of extinct animals. Often, bone microstructure is studied using two-dimensional (2D) sections, and three-dimensional (3D) shape and orientation of structures are estimated by modelling the structures using idealised geometries based on information from their cross sections. However, these methods rely on structures meeting strict geometric assumptions. Recently, 3D methods have been proposed which could provide a more accurate and robust approach to bone histology, but these have not been tested in direct comparison with their 2D counterparts in terms of accuracy and sensitivity to deviations from model assumptions. We compared 2D and 3D methodologies for estimating key microstructural traits using a combination of experimental and idealised test datasets. We generated populations of cylinders (canals) and ellipsoids (osteocyte lacunae), varying the cross-sectional aspect ratios of cylinders and orientation of ellipsoids to test sensitivity to deviations from cylindricality and longitudinal orientation, respectively. Using published methods, based on 2D sections and 3D datasets, we estimated cylinder orientation and ellipsoid volume. We applied the same methods to six CT datasets of duck cortical bone, using the full volumes for 3D measurements and single CT slices to represent 2D sections. Using in silico test datasets that did deviate from ideal cylinders and ellipsoids resulted in inaccurate estimates of cylinder or canal orientation, and reduced accuracy in estimates of ellipsoid and lacunar volume. These results highlight the importance of using appropriate 3D imaging and quantitative methods for quantifying volume and orientation of 3D structures and offer approaches to significantly enhance our understanding of bone physiology based on accurate measures for bone microstructures.
- Subjects :
- 0301 basic medicine
Histology
osteocyte
bone
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
vascular canal
X‐ray CT
image analysis
medicine
Sensitivity (control systems)
Molecular Biology
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Bone growth
Original Paper
fossil
Orientation (computer vision)
Bone physiology
Cell Biology
Original Papers
Ellipsoid
030104 developmental biology
medicine.anatomical_structure
Osteocyte
Cortical bone
Anatomy
Biological system
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Geology
Developmental Biology
Test data
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14697580 and 00218782
- Volume :
- 238
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of Anatomy
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....244aaad4e14d5f7f3c92e2297a2f1cf0