Ex-vivo Ultrasonic Tomography Imaging of Cortical Bone Based on Velocity Model Prediction

Quantitative ultrasound becomes an up-and-coming modality for bone evaluation in recent years. Due to the significant sound velocity contrast between the hard and soft tissue, precise ultrasound bone imaging remains a challenge. The conventional ultrasound imaging method assumes the background sound velocity is uniform, resulting in the distortion of the inner bone surface in reconstruction process. To overcome the limitation, in virtue of ultrasonic tomography (UST), a method called time-domain ray-tracing synthetic aperture based on velocity model prediction (TD-RTSA-VP) was proposed to perform accurate ultrasound imaging of the cortical bone. The result of ex-vivo bovine femur experiment validated the effectiveness of TD-RTSA-VP.