I am planning to use Segment Geometry from SlicerBiomech Extension to calculate 2nd moments of area for mouse mandibles based on cross sections. Mouse have large incisors, should I remove them and other teeth or include them for calculating 2nd moments of area?
I saw that in the tutorial video for a cat mandible, the teeth were kept there. Perhaps teeth do not matter?
My second question is, how accurate the cross-section segmentation should be? I can’t find an efficient way to segment out the small cavities (see picture below), particularly those in the trabecular bone. If these small holes are filled, would it impact much of the second moments of area calculation?
That really depends on your question. You’re going to get different results depending on whether you keep the teeth in or not. Same goes for the functional teeth that have already emerged. One argument is that the large incisor in the jaw is going to add structure and reinforcement in the real world so removing it may give an inaccurate idea of how stiff the jaw is.
I would not worry so much about the small cavities. That is in part a resolution problem. First, holes that are only a few pixels large will not impact your results greatly. Especially since it looks like your scan is high resolution. Second, if you are comparing 2nd moment across many scans with similar resolutions then you will still get comparable patterns. I’d be more concerned about not being able to segment small cavities if you’re comparing a low resolution scan with a high resolution scan.
Thanks, Jonathan @jmhuie! These are really helpful.
It makes sense to keep the incisors there since they keep growing and mice need to constant bite on it. I need to do some experiments with or without teeth.
