Haihui Cao1,2, Jerome Ackerman2,3, Thomas D. Crenshaw4, Patricia Dunning5, Melvin Glimcher1,2, Yaotang Wu1,2
1Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 3Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; 4Department of Animal Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; 5Department of Radiology, Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Non-invasive measurement of the degree of bone mineralization is critical for the diagnosis of metabolic bone diseases. Combined WASPI and Micro CT was utilized to measure degree of mineralization of porcine bone specimens from pigs fed diets with either marginal or excess Calcium and Phosphorus. By transferring CT and MRI images into one coordinate system, one can extract bone mineral density measured by micro CT and bone matrix density measured by WASPI from the same region of interest. The preliminary data show potential merits of combined WASPI and micro CT measurements for noninvasive in vivo characterization of bone mineralization.