Radon Analysis of Ultrasonic Guided Waves Propagating in a Human Tibia

Speaker:Prof.Lawrence H Le (UA)

Time and Date: 9:30- , Dec. 11, 2015

Place: Room 521, Physics Building, Handan Campus

 

 

Abstract

Ultrasound is an indispensable imaging modality to study soft tissues in diagnostic radiology. The use of ultrasound to study hard tissues is not common but in recent years modest interest has been generated to use ultrasound to assess osteoporosis and related fractures. Quantitative guided-wave ultrasonography is promising to evaluate skeletal quality because the cortex of long bone is a strong waveguide for ultrasound and its propagation characteristics are sensitive to the thickness and elastic properties of the cortex. Using the axial transmission configuration, the signals are typically acquired by multichannel recording and contain many overlapping waveforms, which presents a challenging task to modal identification.

 

Current signal processing methods used to study bone data do not provide sufficient wavefield separation capability and imaging resolution to analyze multimodal signals. Based on our previous pioneering and successful application of Radon transform to process simulation and in-vitro data, we present the novel application of the Radon technique to analyze an in-vivo data set from human tibia. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the method to extract guided modes, reconstruct wavefields, and enhance imaging resolution of the dispersive guided-wave energies. The proposed method offers a robust and powerful tool to supplement the current signal processing techniques to process multichannel axially-transmitting in-vivo data for bone tissue characterization.