DECOMPOSITION OF INTERFERING ULTRASONIC WAVES IN BONE AND BONE‐MIMICKING MATERIALS

Cancellous bone is a lattice‐like arrangement of solid trabeculae surrounded by soft bone marrow. When interrogated with ultrasonic waves, the complex architecture gives rise to two longitudinal modes known as a fast and a slow wave. Depending on experimental conditions and the ultrasonic characteristics of the bone sample under investigation, the two waves may strongly overlap in the ultrasounic data. Analyzing such data conventionally, as if only one wave were present, can potentially mask or alter bone quality parameters that are commonly used in clinical sonometry.In this study, ultrasonic data were acquired on a bovine femur condyle specimen and on a plastic bone‐mimicking phantom constructed from Lucite and Lexan blocks. The acquired data were used as inputs to a program that implements a Bayesian calculation to model the ultrasound signal as two interfering plane waves and then estimates the ultrasonic parameters of the fast and slow waves. The calculations were carried out using Markov chain Monte...