About the Bone Analysis Wizard

Dragonfly's Bone Analysis Wizard is a pre-clinical research application designed for the evaluation of high-resolution micro-CT image data of bone specimens. Automated separation of cortical and trabecular bone from filled bone regions of interest drives the calculation of common bone morphometric indices that provide researchers with quantitative descriptions of bone micro-architecture (see Global Measurements). In addition, 3D vector-based mappings of anisotropy magnitude and orientation, as well as 3D scalar-based mappings of anisotropy and volume fraction, can be computed for partial and whole bone specimens and then visualized and evaluated in 3D views (see Scalar and Vector Fields). The final step in most Bone Analysis workflows is to generate a report, which can include computed global measurements, distributions of bone mineral densities, plots of slice-by-slice measurements, and screen captures taken during the current session (see Generating Reports).

The Bone Analysis module for Dragonfly requires a high-performance workstation equipped with 32+ GB of RAM to handle processing and visualization demands. You can review the system requirements and recommendations on the Dragonfly website (dragonfly.comet.tech/en/getting-started).

Currently available micro-CT scanners can achieve an isotropic voxel size as low as a few micrometers, which should be sufficient for investigating structures such as mouse trabeculae that have widths of approximately 30 to 50 micrometers. You should also note that measurement error will decrease as the ratio of voxel size to object size decreases, regardless of scale.