Ultrasonic guided wave propagation in long bones with varying cortical thickness
The propagation of ultrasonic guided wave (GW) in the long bone is very sensitive to the bones' shapes, properties and cortical thicknesses (CTh). Most of the previous studies on the GW propagation in long bones mainly focused on the bones with uniform CTh. However, it is necessary to understand the impacts of CTh variation, such as mode conversion. Therefore, an adequate analysis on GW propagating in long bones with varying CTh is essential for the precise calibration of the quantitative measurement of it. The aim of this study is to use a modified boundary element method (BEM) to analyze the GW propagation characteristics in long bones with varying CTh. Numerical analysis implemented by t…
Assessment of the fundamental flexural guided wave in cortical bone by an ultrasonic axial-transmission array transducer
Abstract The fundamental flexural guided wave (FFGW), as modeled, for example, by the A0 Lamb mode, is a clinically useful indicator of cortical bone thickness. In the work described in this article, we tested so-called multiridge-based analysis, based on the crazy climber algorithm and short-time Fourier transform, for assessment of the FFGW component recorded by a clinical array transducer featuring a limited number of elements. Methods included numerical finite-element simulations and experiments in bone phantoms and human radius specimens ( n = 41). The proposed approach enabled extraction of the FFGW component and determination of its group velocity. This group velocity was in good ag…
Coded excitation speeds up the detection of the fundamental flexural guided wave in coated tubes
The fundamental flexural guided wave (FFGW) permits ultrasonic assessment of the wall thickness of solid waveguides, such as tubes or, e.g., long cortical bones. Recently, an optical non-contact method was proposed for ultrasound excitation and detection with the aim of facilitating the FFGW reception by suppressing the interfering modes from the soft coating. This technique suffers from low SNR and requires iterative physical scanning across the source-receiver distance for 2D-FFT analysis. This means that SNR improvement achieved by temporal averaging becomes time-consuming (several minutes) which reduces the applicability of the technique, especially in time-critical applications such as…