Micro-CT
Definition
Computed tomography at voxel sizes of 10 to 100 micrometres, resolving individual trabeculae and bone microarchitecture invisible to clinical CT or surface examination. Applied in forensic anthropology for trabecular age estimation, cut-mark cross-section analysis, and hidden fracture detection.
- Voxel size
- 10 to 100 micrometres
- Field
- Forensic anthropology
- Applications
- Trabecular age estimation, cut-mark cross-sections, hidden fractures
- Resolves
- Individual bone trabeculae
Common questions
How does this differ from a clinical hospital CT scan?+
Clinical CT is optimised for patient dose and speed, with voxel sizes typically over a millimetre; micro-CT trades speed and specimen size for resolution roughly ten to a hundred times finer, which is what lets it show individual trabecular struts rather than just gross bone shape.
What is the practical limitation of micro-CT in casework?+
Specimen size and scan duration constrain it mostly to excised bone samples or small skeletal elements rather than whole-body examination, and the fine resolution comes with correspondingly longer acquisition times than clinical imaging.
Related terms
- Agisoft Metashape
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- COLMAP
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- DBSML
- Detroit-Bone Sex/Maturity Logic: a logistic-regression-based classification system for sex estimation from cranial and postcranial linear measurements, developed at Wayne State University, providing...
- Explainability (ML Forensic)
- The capacity of a machine-learning model to articulate, in interpretable terms, the features driving its classification or estimation output. Required under Daubert,...
- Geomorph (R Package)
- An open-source R package (Adams and Otarola-Castillo 2013; actively maintained through 2024) implementing Procrustes superimposition, principal component analysis in shape space, multivariate...
- LASSO Regression
- Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator: a regularised regression method that shrinks non-predictive coefficients toward zero, performing simultaneous feature selection and regression....
- Procrustes Superimposition
- The statistical procedure in geometric morphometrics that removes non-shape variation (translation, rotation, scale) from a set of landmark coordinates, leaving only shape...
- Structure-from-Motion (SfM)
- A photogrammetric technique in which overlapping images from a drone or camera, processed by software, generate a three-dimensional point cloud and textured...
- Thin-Plate Spline (TPS)
- A mathematical warping function used in geometric morphometrics to visualise the shape difference between a reference specimen and a target, deforming a...