BoneCreo: a novel approach for generating a geometric model of the bone structure

Bones, the fundamental part of the skeleton, are constantly subjected to many biological processes including growth, feeding and remodelling. Remodelling causes changes in bone structure that may be difficult to notice on a day-to-day basis but become significant over the longer time span. It acts on the cancellous and cortical bone tissue, causing alterations in thickness and spatial arrangement in the first and alternations in pore size in the second. In healthy individuals such changes are a part of the natural bone remodelling process explained by Wolff’s law. However, the direction of such changes is difficult to predict in patients in various pathological states in which bone health is affected. Here, we present a method to generate a computer based geometric model of the bone structure based on the cancellous tissue structure images. As a result we obtained a geometric model of the structure corresponding to the physical model of the cancellous bone. Such a model can be used in computer simulation to predict the remodelling changes in the healthy and pathological bone structures.