“…This method, which is a variant of the Scaling Index Method Monetti et al, 2003;Müller et al, 2006), differs from previous approaches where only an average global directionality on images was considered (Monetti et al, 2004). Recently, the SIM has been applied to µ-CT images of trabecular bone (Monetti et al, 2007;Räth et al, 2008;Monetti et al, 2009) where it was demonstrated that the use of directional information allows identifying the most important load-bearing bone substructures. As shown below, any suitable method to estimate directions in 2D or 3D can be coupled to this structure characterization procedure.…”