A novel approach to noninvasive and practical assessment of bone structure is to analyze the texture of high resolution radiographs of trabecular bone [11]. Dr. Giger, Professor of Radiology and a co-investigator on this application, has developed a method for characterizing bone structure by computerized texture analysis of digitized high-resolution radiographs [12-16]. In this approach, the texture is analyzed in several ways, including Fourier based analysis, which yields root mean square (RMS) as a measure of magnitude of trabecular bone texture pattern, and the first moment of power spectrum (FMP) which characterizes the texture pattern's frequency [13, 15, 16]; and Minkowski dimension fractal analysis [17-20]. Radiographic texture analysis has been studied in vivo, on lumbar spine radiographs and found to predict presence of vertebral fractures elsewhere in the spine more reliably than did the BMD of the spine [13, 14]. In addition, in an in vitro study texture features as well as BMD were analyzed in femoral neck specimens obtained during surgical hip replacement. Mechanical loading (crush test) was then performed on cubes of trabecular bone machined from these specimens to determine their bone strength. It was found that the combination of BMD and texture analysis predicted bone strength better than BMD alone [12, 15, 16].