Comparison of two methods for measuring orientation.

At the Department of Dental Radiology of ACTA, the line fraction deviation (LFD) method was developed to measure orientation on radiographic trabecular patterns. This article explains the measurement of the LFD index of orientation in a downscaled model. When investigations began to produce noteworthy results, the need for deeper understanding of the method and the resulting diagrams increased. Because it had previously been applied on rather complex patterns originating from bone it seemed worthwhile to study simpler images as well, which might yield a more intuitive understanding of the diagrams. Moreover, it seemed useful to compare the new LFD method with the well-accepted mean intercept length (MIL) method. Fifty images originating from cancellous bone structures and 25 drawings were analyzed. The results show that the MIL method tends to produce ellipses (not only on images originating from bone), and also that the LFD method is more sensitive to anisotropy.