Comparison of Velocity and Ultrasound Transit Time Spectroscopy in Cancellous Bone Phantom

Project Report from the year 2018 in the subject Medicine - Biomedical Engineering, grade: 1.2, Egerton University, language: English, abstract: Medical imaging technology plays an important role of creating internal images of the human body for clinical or medical purposes. Historically, this technology was born in November 1895 when Wilhelm Roentgen discovered electromagnetic radiation (x-ray) (Levine, 2010). Medical imaging technique can be defined as a technique which each modality could provide unique details of the human body function. The discovery of x-ray was a motivation reason for others to improve various technologies in medical imaging over the past years such as computed tomography (CT), ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Ultrasound is one of the medical imaging technologies that are known as sound waves with a frequency above 20 KHz that excess the human hearing range using non-ionizing radiation. Ultrasound is a diagnostic modality technique that has been in clinical use over the past 40 years when Theodore Dussik and his brother Friederich in 1940s attempted to diagnose brain tumours using ultrasound waves, although their incredible work achieved success in 1970s. The aim of this study is to test the hypothesis that the minimum ultrasound transit time above noise (derived from the transit time spectrum) through cancellous bone may predict the velocity measurement. Therefore, deconvolution method has been used to predict ultrasound transit time through cancellous bone and then compare it to the reported transit time from clinical ultrasound bone densitometer (CUBA).