Application of Laws’ masks to bone texture analysis: An innovative image analysis tool in osteoporosis

The objective of this study was to explore Laws' masks as a new application of texture analysis to characterise bone micro-architecture and to check its dependence from the spatial resolution. The method is based on masks that aim to filter the images. From each mask, classical statistical parameters can be calculated. Our study was performed on 114 women with osteoporotic fractures and 182 age-matched healthy post menopausal women. For all subjects radiographs were obtained of the calcaneus with a new high-resolution X-ray device. The bone mineral density measurements were assessed by DXA. The best compromise between reproducibility and capability to discriminate between fractured cases and controls were obtained with the "standard deviation" parameter derived from the TR
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mask. this study showed the dependence of Laws' masks parameters on image resolution, which confirms the necessity to perform Laws' textural measurements on high-resolution images. Thus, this method seems to be a promising routine technique for the determination of osteoporosis fracture risk from radiographs of the calcaneus independently from BMD.