ESTIMATION OF TRABECULAR BONE AXIS FOR CHARACTERIZATION OF CANCELLOUSBONE USING SCATTERED ULTRASONIC WAVE

A new method has been proposed to measure the thickness and the interv al of trabecular bones for diagnosing osteoporosis, in which the ultra sound signals scattered by trabecular bones are analyzed by modeling c ancellous bone as a multilayered grating. For applying this technique to actual diagnosis, the estimation of the direction of the trabecular bone axis is necessary. In this paper an estimation method for obtain ing the direction is proposed, where typical pictures of the frequency spectrum are obtained by changing the angle between the bone axis and the detecting plane, This method has been proved to estimate the dire ction successfully. The principle and the experimental verification ar e described here.