Establishing the fibula as a non-weight bearing control

Project Description

Establishing whether the fibula can be a non-weight bearing control instead of distal radius…

We know that typically the two main HR-pQCT scanning sites, the radius and tibia, often are surrogates for non-weight bearing and weight-bearing mechanical loading, respectively. However, a complicating factor of the radius is that it is also a site that is prone to motion artifact during HR-pQCT acquisition. There is research showing that the fibula is not carrying very much weight relative to the tibia, and since it is scanned in the same FOV as the tibia, it is subject to exactly the same motion artifacts. Comparing changes in the tibia and fibula during spaceflight could help distinguish their responses to mechanical unloading, while reducing the confounding effect of differences in motion artefacts between the separately scanned tibia and radius.

It would require going back to the original ISQ files from the TBONE study and extracting the fibula from each scan. This would involve a simple modification to the IPL script that gets the “largest bone” to getting the “second largest bone”. Subsequently, a full morphological analysis and voxel-based assessment could be performed on the fibula data for direct comparison to the tibia.

Scope

• PhD/MSc side project
• Summer student

Data Source

• TBONE

Resources

• IPL scripts