Identification of critical location on a microstructural bone network

Abstract

Identification of a critical location in complex structures is one of the most important issues that affects the quality of safety in human life. Specifically, finding high fracture spots of a bone microstructure in our body is a very important research topic; however, it is still not well understood. In this paper, we study on identifying critical locations in a bone microstructure with our bone network model. In fact, about 25 million people in the United States suffer from osteoporosis, which is a systemic skeletal disease characterized by low bone mass and micro-architectural deterioration of bone tissue leading to enhanced bone fragility and a consequent increase in fracture risk. However, currently available techniques for the diagnosis of osteoporosis and the identification of critical locations of bone microstructure are limited. We create a bone network model based on properties of a bone microstructure and we develop a method, called information propagation, to identify critical locations in a bone network. Our paper focuses on detecting important edges as critical locations for the strength of bone microstructure when there are external forces applied to the bone network. Then, we evaluate results of the method in comparison with existing methods including the weighted betweenness centrality and the weighted bridge coefficient. We conclude with the discussion on advantages and disadvantages among those methods.