Experiment and simulation of reflected slow and fast wave correlation with cancellous bone models

Abstract

Incorporating fast and slow wave analysis into ultrasound measurements can improve the accuracy of bone quality estimation to detect the risk of osteoporosis-related fractures. Since the pulse-echo technique can perform measurements at critical bone locations, this technique is offered by applying fast and slow wave analysis to improve the accuracy of the measurement technique. Thus, the objective of this paper is to conduct simulation and experiment for the pulse-echo technique to investigate correlation reflected fast and slow wave with various porosity of cancellous bone models. The recorded reflected wave (mix wave) is separated method into individual reflected fast and slow wave using bandlimited deconvolution. Further, the parameters for the mix, fast and slow waves are calculated, plotted against porosity and correlation of the parameter's data is observed. The result between simulation and experiment also compared in terms of parameters behaviour versus porosity. The result shows that the reflected fast and slow wave separated using bandlimited deconvolution method has characteristics that represent wave that propagate through solid or pore part of the porous structure as found by previous works. Moreover, the simulation result shows that the parameter of reflected fast and slow wave shows a high correlation with porosity. However, for experiment, only attenuation parameters shows significant correlation with porosity ({\mathrm{R}^{2}}_{\text{fast}}=0.51 and {\mathrm{R}^{2}}_{\text{slow}}=-0.76). The experiment may experience additional undesired noise in comparison with the simulation. Nevertheless, the attenuation parameters were consistent between the simulation and the experiment. The overall result shows that studying fast and slow waves instead of mix waves for bone quality estimation can help improve the accuracy of pulse-echo measurement.