Assessing the intimate mechanobiological link between human bone micro-scale trabecular architecture and micro-damages

•Bone lacunae act as crack deviators predominantly in healthy samples;•Osteoporotic samples are characterized by high density of roundish and oblate lacunae;•Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool to develop micro-crack recognition systems;•With CNN, fracture mechanics parameters can be quantified from synchrotron images;•Validated micro-FE models quantify stress intensity factors in human trabecular bones.