Dielectric Properties in Fresh Trabecular Bone Tissue from 1MHz to 1000MHz: A Fast and Non Destructive Quality Evaluation Technique

Abstract

The increasing research on development of novel bio-materials has resulted in several studies on non-destructive evaluation methods for characterizing these materials and the biological materials receiving them. A broad range of techniques are available. As an alternative tool, electrical impedance spectroscopy, has become a widely used, non destructive and low cost technique in material quality evaluation. Particularly in bones, it has also been demonstrated that mechanical characteristics are strongly correlated to dielectric properties. In this work, non destructive estimation (the same samples can be tested using other techniques) of the dielectric properties of fresh trabecular bones (layered lossy structure) using coaxial probes is analyzed from 1MHz to 10MHz (in frequency domain) and from 80MHz to 1GHz (in both, frequency and time domain). Frequency domain system identification is used to build the estimation in the low frequency range and an orthonormal based identification approach, for the high frequency data. Comments on conductive samples, non Debye dielectrics and polarization effects are added. The methodology was applied to a particular human sample population of aged adult femur heads and results are presented here. A comparison with destructive test, in which the samples were machined into cylinders of 7mm diameter, is also performed.