Technical note Measurements of acoustic dispersion on…技术说明声学色散测量.pdfVIP

Medical Engineering Physics 28 (2006) 187–193 Technical note Measurements of acoustic dispersion on calcaneus using spilt spectrum processing technique Pei-Jarn Chen, Tainsong Chen ∗ Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University, No. 1, Ta-Hsueh Road, Tainan 70101, Taiwan Received 8 November 2004; received in revised form 4 February 2005; accepted 8 April 2005 Abstract The speed of sound (SOS) has become a useful tool in osteoporosis assessment, since it represents a combination of density and compress- ibility of bone tissue and should provide better information on bone quality and an estimate the fracture risk. In general, the speed of sound on dispersive material, such as bone tissue, depends strongly on frequency. Therefore, a measurement of velocity dispersion magnitude (VDM) might provide more important bone structure information than measurements of bone mineral density (BMD), SOS or broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA). To obtain the velocity dispersion magnitude requires a sequence of pulses that have a frequency that is different from that used in conventional approaches. The measurement is complicated by the fact that pulse waveform will distort as the pulses propagate through the frequency-dependent medium. Alternatively, the phase velocity and velocity dispersion measurements also can be obtained on frequency-domain processing. However, the accuracy of those techniques is affected by the 2mπ ambiguity in the phase unwrapping process in frequency domain. And the spectrum approach is highly dependent on the gating window selection in time domain signals. The time-domain split spectrum processing (SSP) technique is proposed here to measure the