Imaging of the femoral neck cortical bone based on iterative time domain topological energy

Abstract

Osteoporosis is a frequent bone disease that mainly affects women after menopause. It is characterized by a decrease in bone mass and a deterioration of the micro-architecture, which can lead to an increased risk of fracture. Ultrasound technologies provide an affordable mean to implement non invasive solutions to diagnostically assess the characteristics of the bone structure. In this work, we are interested in imaging the external and internal boundary of the cortical bone, and the evaluation of the thickness using the Time Domain Topological Energy (TDTE) method. These two properties are important to interpret the measurements of guided waves dispersion curves and predict the risk of osteoporosis and fracture. The iterative procedure of TDTE provides better performance in imaging the internal boundary of the cortical bone compared to the one-step TDTE. The barrier of implementing iterative TDTE is the requirements of huge storage during the numerical propagation step. A specific back-propagation strategy is implemented here to deal with this obstacle. The obtained results will be illustrated numerically and experimentally.