CT and MR assessment of osteoporosis.

Over the past decades there has been remarkable progress in the development and application of non-invasive radiological methods for assessing the skeletal bone mass and status. It is possible to evaluate the peripheral or axial entire skeleton as well as the trabecular bone or cortical bone envelopes with a high degree of accuracy and precision, and with a reasonable capacity for determining bone strength and predicting fracture risk. Cross sectional imaging methods such as CT and MR yield significant advantages for these applications since they are the only techniques which allow for accurate three dimensional localization of tissue and for true isolation of the trabecular and the cortical bone compartment. Both methods can be applied to practically every anatomic location in the human body.