Non-invasive Methodological Techniques to Determine Health of a Bone

The healthiness of bone is decided by organic as well as inorganic contents. Inappropriate proportions of organic (collagen) and inorganic (minerals) contents give rise to fractures and diseases like arthritis, osteopenia, and osteoporosis. Bone Mineral Density (BMD) is a commonly used inorganic clinical indicator to determine the quality of bone. There are invasive methods like chemical quantitative analysis, and noninvasive methods include imaging techniques, to find the composition of bone. This paper is to review different medical imaging techniques like X-Ray, DEXA, SR µCT, Photo Acoustic Imaging, Quantitative Ultrasound to do bone mineral density analysis. The study concludes that the imaging technique Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA) will be a more useful diagnostic modality for rapid investigation of bone health. It is a two-dimensional imaging tool that calculates a ratio of Bone Mineral Contents (BMC) with an area of bone is known as areal BMD. But the shortcoming of DEXA technique is that the bones of different lengths may produce the same BMD results by maintaining the equal ratio thereby indicating incorrect strength of bones. Hence along with the area, we have to take into account the thickness of the bone to predict BMD.