Remove extrema of objects in image

Good morning everyone,

I have a 3D binary image of trabecular bone, and I need the trabeculae to be separated so that I can extract properties of each trabucula, i.e. volume, dimensions, etc. In order to do this, I decided on removing the pixels representing the extrema of each trabecula. I have 2 Nx3 matrices representing the endpoints of each trabecula in the image, and I would like to remove all of these points. How can this be done? Thanks in advance

[Matt Kindig]

How are the "extrema" defined? Can you post an example of the Nx3 endpoints definition, as well as an image describing what you are attempting to do?

[Melvin]

The extrema was defined as the point (pixel) where the labeled object (trabecula) has its final point in the major axis. This is done in 3D using ImageJ, and I exported the results as xls. The spreadsheet was imported into my code, and I extracted the extrema from the spreadsheet in an Nx3 matrix as follows:

EP1 = C(:,3:5); EP2 = C(:,6:8); EP = vertcat(EP1,EP2);

I thought about plotting these points, converting the plot into an image w/ the same dimensions as my original image, and then taking the difference between the images, but I'm not sure how to go about this.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

A screenshot would help. If you want to "lop off" extrema from an image, you can use imopen() but I can't really tell if that would help with your images or not since I can't visualize what you're saying.