CT-Based Bone and Muscle Assessment in Normal and Pathological Conditions

This article outlines the methods and applications of threshold-based techniques to assess in vivo muscle and bone tissue distribution in normal and pathological conditions using computed tomography imaging. The approaches described here use medical imaging processing techniques and computational methods to study bone mechanical proprieties, analyze and quantify muscle morphology, visualize changes with 3-D models, develop subject-specific numerical profiles, and assess muscle and bone changes during clinical treatments. Applications of these methodologies are employed to simulate bone mechanics under particular stressful situation, to depict subject-specific muscle profiling associated with age and pathology, to illustrate and quantify muscle degeneration and its partial reversal via functional electric stimulation, and to highlight recovery following total hip arthroplasty.