Estimation of Trabecular Bone Axis for Characterization of Cancellous Bone Using Scattered Ultrasonic Wave

Abstract

A new method has been proposed to measure the thickness and the interval of trabecular bones for diagnosing osteoporosis, in which the ultrasound signals scattered by trabecular bones are analyzed by modeling cancellous bone as a multilayered grating. For applying this technique to actual diagnosis, the estimation of the direction of the trabecular bone axis is necessary. In this paper an estimation method for obtaining the direction is proposed, where typical pictures of the frequency spectrum are obtained by changing the angle between the bone axis and the detecting plane. This method has been proved to estimate the direction successfully. The principle and the experimental verification are described here.