Extracting guided wave characteristics of bone phantoms from ultrasonometric data for osteoporosis diagnosis

Abstract

This work is a continuation of research presented at the last year DD meeting and partly published in [1], [2] and papers cited therein. Computer models for analytically based simulation of ultrasonic guided wave (GW) propagation in multilayer bone phantoms have been developed and used for systematic numerical analysis of GW propagation depending on phantoms' structure aimed to identify signs predicting osteoporosis. Now we have focused on developing reliable methods of processing experimental data to extract GW characteristics that can be used in the objective functions constructed for the inverse problem solution. Minimization of the objective functions in the space of waveguide's elastic constants and thicknesses yields its effective material parameters indicating a change in the strength properties.