Predicting osseous changes in ankle fractures

A quantitative assay of subtle morphologic changes that are induced in the trabecular structure of weight-bearing bones as a result of immobilization prescribed as part of routine clinical management is investigated. It is postulated that a clinically meaningful structural measure can be inferred from comparatively small, relatively uniform regions of trabecular bone, which are easily isolated from conventional transmission radiographs. This approach derives from the observation that common transmission radiographs of alveolar bone contain trabecular regions with spatial attributes that are statistically independent of image magnification over a reasonable range of spatial frequencies. Selecting these regions for analysis is advantageous because certain attributes of the resulting data are theoretically independent of the focal-object distance used to produce the original radiograph. Therefore, the size and shape of the irradiated tissue mass do not influence the measurement, as they do in morphometric-based analysis.<>