Cortical bone plays a big role in the mechanical competence of bone. The analysis of cortical bone requires accurate
segmentation methods. Level set methods are usually in the state-of-the-art for segmenting medical images. However,
traditional implementations of this method are computationally expensive. This drawback was recently tackled through the
so-called coherent propagation extension of the classical algorithm which has decreased computation times dramatically. In
this study, we assess the potential of this technique for segmenting cortical bone in interactive time in 3D images acquired
through High Resolution peripheral Quantitative Computed Tomography (HR-pQCT). The obtained segmentations are
used to estimate cortical thickness and cortical porosity of the investigated images. Cortical thickness and Cortical porosity
is computed using sphere fitting and mathematical morphological operations respectively. Qualitative comparison between
the segmentations of our proposed algorithm and a previously published approach on six images volumes reveals superior
smoothness properties of the level set approach. While the proposed method yields similar results to previous approaches
in regions where the boundary between trabecular and cortical bone is well defined, it yields more stable segmentations in
challenging regions. This results in more stable estimation of parameters of cortical bone. The proposed technique takes
few seconds to compute, which makes it suitable for clinical settings.
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