Fractal lacunarity of trabecular bone and magnetic resonance imaging: New perspectives for osteoporotic fracture risk assessment

Osteoporosis represents one major health condition for our growing elderly population. It accounts for severe morbidity and increased mortality in postmenopausal women and it is becoming an emerging health concern even in aging men. Screening of the population at risk for bone degeneration and treatment assessment of osteoporotic patients to prevent bone fragility fractures represent useful tools to improve quality of life in the elderly and to lighten the related socio-economic impact. Bone mineral density (BMD) estimate by means of dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry is normally used in clinical practice for osteoporosis diagnosis. Nevertheless, BMD alone does not represent a good predictor of fracture risk. From a clinical point of view, bone microarchitecture seems to be an intriguing aspect to characterize bone alteration patterns in aging and pathology. The widening into clinical practice of medical imaging techniques and the impressive advances in information technologies together with enhanced capacity of power calculation have promoted proliferation of new methods to assess changes of trabecular bone architecture (TBA) during aging and osteoporosis. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has recently arisen as a useful tool to measure bone structure in vivo. In particular, high-resolution MRI techniques have introduced new perspectives for TBA characterization by non-invasive non-ionizing methods. However, texture analysis methods have not found favor with clinicians as they produce quite a few parameters whose interpretation is difficult. The introduction in biomedical field of paradigms, such as theory of complexity, chaos, and fractals, suggests new approaches and provides innovative tools to develop computerized methods that, by producing a limited number of parameters sensitive to pathology onset and progression, would speed up their application into clinical practice. Complexity of living beings and fractality of several physio-anatomic structures suggest fractal analysis as a promising approach to quantify morpho-functional changes in both aging and pathology. In this particular context, fractal lacunarity seems to be the proper tool to characterize TBA texture as it is able to describe both discontinuity of bone network and sizes of bone marrow spaces, whose changes are an index of bone fracture risk. In this paper, an original method of MRI texture analysis, based on TBA fractal lacunarity is described and discussed in the light of new perspectives for early diagnosis of osteoporotic fractures.