Acoustic property measurements for bone tissue by ultrasonic techniques

This paper proposes a new method to measure the acoustic speed and attenuation coefficient for the various bone tissues simultaneously from dual reflectoin signals. Two transducers were placed in the front of test object, one transducer was the transmitter as well as the receiver, while the other one was of the receiver only. The measurement of acoustic speed from a test object was based on both the information of time-of-flight obtained from signals received by two transducers and the corresponding geometrical parameters from the arrangement of transducers. The attenuation coefficient was further calculated directly by taking the amplitude ratio of the successive echo from two sequences of the received signals. The feasibility of this technique was verified by in vitro measurement from the various porcine bone specimen. The results have shown consistently with those done by other techniques. In vivo measurements on human tibia also presented in this paper.