The tissue-level Young’s modulus of trabecular bone is important for detailed mechanical analysis of bone and bone-implant mechanical interactions. However, the heterogeneity and small size of the trabecular struts complicate an accurate determination. Methods such as micro-mechanical testing of single trabeculae, ultrasonic testing, and nanoindentation have been used to estimate the trabecular Young’s modulus. This review summarizes and classifies the trabecular Young’s moduli reported in the literature. Information on species, anatomic site, and test condition of the samples has also been gathered. Advantages and disadvantages of the different methods together with recent developments are discussed, followed by some suggestions for potential improvement, for future work. In summary, this review provides a thorough introduction to the approaches used for determining trabecular Young’s modulus, highlights important considerations when applying these methods and summarizes the reported Young’s modulus for follow-up studies on trabecular properties.

We propose a DVC technique that is based on higher-order finite-element discretization of the displacement field and a global optimization procedure. We use curvature penalization to suppress non-physical fluctuations of the displacement field and resulting erroneous strain concentrations. The performance of the proposed method is compared to the commercial code Avizo using trabecular bone images and found to perform slightly better in most cases. In addition, we stress that the performance of a DVC method needs to be evaluated using double scans (zero strain), virtual deformation (imposed deformation) and real deformation. Double scans give insight into the presence of noise and artifacts whereas virtual deformation benchmarks allows evaluation of the performance without noise and artifacts. Investigation of the performance for actual deformed heterogeneous materials is needed for evaluation with noise, artifacts and non-zero strains. We show that both decreasing the resolution of the displacement field (increasing subvolume size) as well as (increasing) curvature penalization (regularization) have a similar effect on the performance of evaluated DVC methods: Decreasing the detrimental effect of noise, artifacts and interpolation errors, but also decreasing the sensitivity of a DVC method to displacement peaks, discontinuities and strain concentrations. The needed amount of regularization is a trade-off between accuracy and precision of the estimated strain fields and their resolution. The obtainable accuracy and precision of the estimated displacement fields are influenced by interpolation errors in the DVC procedure and the relative amount of detail, noise and artifacts in the images. Errors in the displacement field are typically magnified during the strain calculation. Based on the tests and subvolume sizes (16-50 voxels) in this study, the expected order of magnitude of the accuracy and precision is 0.1 micro-voxels and 1 milli-voxels for the displacements and 0.1 and 1 milli-strains of the strain fields. 

The elastic modulus at the single trabecular level is an important parameter for the understanding of the mechanical behavior of trabecular bone. Current methods are commonly limited by the irregular trabecular shape and the accuracy of displacement measurement. The aim of this study was to propose a method to estimate the trabecular modulus overcoming some of these limitations. For high-precision displacement measurements, insitu compression within a synchrotron radiation based X-ray tomograph was used. Trabecular displacements were subsequently estimated by a global digital volume correlation algorithm, followed by high-resolution finite element analyses to account for the irregular geometry. The trabecular elastic moduli were then estimated by comparing the loads from the finite element analyses with those of the experiments. With this strategy, the average elastic modulus was estimated to 3.83 +/- 0.54 GPa for three human trabeculae samples. Though limited by the sample size, the demonstrated method shows a potential to estimate the mechanical properties at the single trabecular level.