CHALLENGES FOR BONE MINERAL DENSITY CALIBRATION ON MICRO-CT

in addition, every calibration procedure as to manage the most important artifacts that can degrade quality of the image, like the beam hardening (BH) (Meganck et al. 2009), that is the more evident in homogeneous object for the interaction of the matter with polychromatic x-rays, and the partial volume effect. The latter can be easily reduced with the adoption of a pixel size at least ten times smaller than the mean dimension of the structure that have to be analyzed (Muller et al. 1996). The BH effects can be reduced with specific x-ray filters (Meganck et al. 2009, Zou et al. 2011), or with some beam hardening specific correction algorithms (Burghardt et al. 2008, Zou et al. 2011).