Three-Dimensional Observation of Microstructure of Bone Tissue Using High-Precision Machining

抄録

This study aims to verify whether the three-dimensional internal information acquisition system we have developed can be applied successfully to the microstructures of consecutively precision-machined biological samples, and to those of metallic samples. Therefore, this study mainly deals with biological hard tissue samples like bones. In this paper, we first studied the precision-machining characteristics of bones. From this, we determined that, to obtain machined surfaces sufficient for internal observations, we need to determine the maximum uncut chip thickness and the cutting speeds, taking the bone’s anisotropy into consideration. Next, we acquired three-dimensional internal information on consecutively precision-machined bone samples using the three-dimensional internal acquisition system we developed. Subsequently, we visualized the internal structures of these machined samples. Our tiling observations acquired an 18×9×3 mm segment as a 6.2×6.2×10μm resolution image. We obtained a three-dimensionally reconstructed image of complex blood vessel networks inside the bone by making the acquired images binary.