Tools to Assess Bone Quality

Tools to Assess Bone Quality

We all know that it is important for bone to be permanently renewed throughout life. So you may wonder what the tools are in order to assess bone quality of each person in this world. Well for the information of everybody, there are numerous tools that are available to assess bones. It could either be in an invasive way or non-invasive way. The traditional technique that has been used for many years is bone densitometry. This is applied with the use of a dual X-ray absorptiometry or quantitative computed tomography.

The newer techniques that have been developed in the past decade include the use of micro-CT and micro-MRI for magnetic resonance imaging. The micro-CT technique has many considerable advantages on it. First is the fact that it provides a very high spatial resolution. In the meantime, it can also be used for the imaging of the trabecular and cortical structure of bone biopsies. This technique, however, is not widely applied in clinical practice. At these times, it is just used in pure research and drug development.

So you may again ponder on the bone structure that can be seen when you use micro-CT technique. Well, we all have an idea that this technique is a truly remarkable technology. It involves the use of a very small X-ray tube and detector array that allows for the assessment of multiple sections of the bone at extremely high spatial resolution. In the study of the new drug Protos, biopsies were used at a resolution of 20 microns in all three directions. This is called as a tropic resolution.

Based upon the generation of the series of sections, we are also able to reconstruct an image three dimensionally. Then everything is just based on the quantitative information that will be considered relevant to this study.