Analysis of bone X-rays using morphological fractals

The authors have applied mathematical morphology for fractal analysis on bone X-ray images. The digitized gray level image is treated as a three-dimensional surface whose fractal dimension is calculated by performing a series of dilations on this surface and plotting the area of the resulting set of surfaces against the size of the structuring element. This approach has the added advantage of encoding structural information via the use of a structuring element. The algorithm has been applied to several bone radiographs, and the results demonstrate that the fractal dimension using mathematical morphology gives a robust texture measure of trabecular bone structures.