Experimental studies of the visualisation of spongious bone by high resolution computed tomography

18 native human lumbar vertebrae were placed in a water phantom and examined by HR-CT. The scans were compared with contact radiographs of correlating thin bone sections by morphologic criteria. The measured lower limit of visualisation of cancellous bone structures is celarly worse than expected from the measurements of spatial resolution with standard phantoms used for HR-CT (0.6 versus 0.4 mm). True and exact imaging of normal cancellous bone cannot be achieved even by modern HR-CT. Noise creates structures mimicking cancellous bone. (orig./MG)