ESB Mobility Award Winners – 2017
Karen Mys
Karen Mys has a Master of Mechanical engineering (mechatronics & robotics), from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, that she obtained with honours (cum laude) in 2014. The same year, she started a PhD at KU Leuven under the supervision of Prof Harry van Lenthe, and she is focussing on Conebeam computed tomography (CBCT) as a promising alternative to High-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) so as to allowing an increased field of view. In particular, she has developed in house reconstruction and imaging processing software able to fully exploit CBCT-imaging capacity for the quantitative analyses of bone microstructure. Since 2016, Karen is member of the permanent education committee of KU Leuven (MSc Biomedical engineering).
Planned Research Project
Thanks to the ESB Mobility Award for Young Researchers Karen will travel to the AO Foundation, Davos, Switzerland. During three months, she will be working with Dr Boyko Gueorguiev Rüegg. Given the promising results obtained by Karen in using CBCT for the quantification of bone microstructure, the general objective of the ESB mobility project is to evaluate the performance of innovative CBCT against HR-pQCT, as the latter stands for the golden standard to measure bone microstructure in vivo and quantify bone mechanical properties.
The hypothesis that innovative CBCT is as good as HR-pQCT will be tested by evaluating the accuracy of CBCT and HR-pQCT with respect to microCT. Each modality will be used to scan trapezium bones and scans will be segmented. Bone volume percent, bone surface, trabecular thickness, trabecular separation, trabecular number will be calculated and compared. Subsequently, the capacity to calculate bone mechanical properties based on CBCT-images will be tested by using voxel-based FE analyses.