Analysis of age-related changes in Haversian canal using image processing techniques

Abstract

The human skeleton changes with increasing age that alters the structure and number of bone microstructures, which includes osteon, lamellae, and haversian canals. Bone tissues have the capability to store the information of these variations which can be analyzed even after death. Much research has been done on European and American populations to analyze the age related change in haversian canals. This study is conducted on Malaysian population samples to analyze the effect of age related changes on haversian canals. Image processing techniques has been used to extract bone microstructures from microscopic images. The results shows that haversian canals area and number of haversian canals have a positive correlation with increasing age which suggested that haversian canal size increased with growing age.