Figure 2
Image based porosity mapping. (a) Fenestrated bony columns of the modiolar bone in the lower basal turn of the human cochlea. Orientation is roughly transversal with scala tympani located at the lower aspect. With permission from Ref.7, their Fig. 18e. (b) Inhomogeneous electrical conductivity distribution on the computational subdomain of the porous modiolus modelled using the ‘mapped conductivity’ method (“Methods”). Briefly, the grey-scale intensities of the pixels of the SEM image in (a) were imported into the binary conditional Eq. (2), with \({\upalpha }\) = 0.5, to yield the conductivity at each pixel of the image, ignoring possible blockage of the porous boney complex. Black: pores (holes) with high conductivity equal to that of perilymph (1.2 S m−1). Pale grey: bone with low conductivity (0.0334 S m−1). Notice the similarity between the anatomical image in (a) and the conductivity map.
