Numerical investigation of ultrasonic attenuation through 2D trabecular bone structures reconstructed from CT scans and random realizations

In this paper, we compare ultrasound interrogations of actual CT-scanned images of trabecular bone with artificial randomly constructed bone. Even though it is known that actual bone does not have randomly distributed trabeculae, we find that the ultrasound attenuations are close enough to cast doubt on any microstructural information, such as trabeculae width and distance between trabeculae, being gleaned from such experiments. More precisely, we perform numerical simulations of ultrasound interrogation on cancellous bone to investigate the phenomenon of ultrasound attenuation as a function of excitation frequency and bone porosity. The theoretical model is based on acoustic propagation equations for a composite fluid-solid material and is solved by a staggered-grid finite-difference scheme in the time domain. Numerical experiments are performed on two-dimensional bone samples reconstructed from CT-scanned images of real human calcaneus and from random distributions of fluid-solid particles generated via the turning bands method. A detailed comparison is performed on various parameters such as the attenuation rate and speed of sound through the bone samples as well as the normalized broadband ultrasound attenuation coefficient. Comparing results from these two types of bone samples allows us to assess the role of bone microstructure in ultrasound attenuation. It is found that the random model provides suitable bone samples for ultrasound interrogation in the transverse direction of the trabecular network. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.