Pathological cortical bone porosity negatively impacts bone strength, but the mechanisms of pathological pore growth are not understood. We hypothesize that the contents of cortical bone pores (marrow or vessels) may be useful indicators of pore expansion mechanisms. In this study, we developed a technique using high resolution CT and DCE-MRI to visualize and identify pore contents. Dynamic features such as temporal intensity difference and transition slope within pore voxels were evaluated and clustered by a K-means clustering algorithm. The average intensity of segmented vessel-filled pores increased over time, demonstrating the ability of our technique to positively identify vessel-filled pores.
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