Development of a practical ultrasonic approach for simultaneous measurement of the thickness and the sound speed in human skull bones: a laboratory phantom study

The availability of a non-invasive express method for the in vivo measurement of both sound velocity and thickness of the human skull bone would be of great benefit to various transcranial ultrasonic imaging and treatment applications. This paper investigates two ultrasonic methods that measure both parameters and are based on the variable focus technique. All the experiments described in this paper were conducted on specially prepared custom skull bone phantoms, including flat and deformed samples, designed and developed in our laboratory. The first method uses a single immersion 2.25 MHz ultrasonic transducer consecutively focused on the front and back surfaces of the sample. The accuracy and precision of this method are demonstrated via single point measurements on flat samples with and without porosity. The measurement results from a specimen with the randomly curved back surface show the possibility of obtaining the inner profile of the skull bone. The second presented method is a practical modification of the variable focus technique for the linear phased array case. The method was tested on flat and curved skull bone phantoms with and without inner porosity showing higher measurement accuracy and simpler practical realization than its scanning counterpart.