Bone mass measurement improvement in micro-CT taking into account the physical phenomena

Due to the increased survival of the patients with cystic fibrosis (CF), studies showed the presence of osteoporosis in CF patients. In this work, a follow-up study of the bone mineral density (BMD) for mice with CF is done using a micro-CT system. In order to perform accurately the measurements, we applied two correction methods aiming to reduce artifacts in CT images. The first correction method is a beam hardening correction technique based on a post-reconstruction procedure and using pre-calculated linearization curves. The second correction method is a hybrid elimination approach of scatter radiations from acquisition projections and based on the use of pre-calculated scatter kernels, simulated analytically. Improvements have been shown concerning image quality (contrast, artifacts reduction) and BMD measurements. (author)