Measurement of bone elasticity in the lab with ultrasound: problems, methods and open questions
Résumé
Cortical bone has anisotropic elastic properties determined by the microstructure and the quality of the mineralized collagen matrix. Knowledge of the stiffness coefficients is an issue for phenotyping, analyzing the biomechanical response to local strains or assessment of novel quantitative ultrasound (QUS) methods. Precise measurement methods which can be used routinely are still demanded. Since the work of Lang in the 60's, US methods have been popular to measure bone elasticity because they are mostly non destructive and can be adapted to any size and shape of samples. Traditional mechanical methods do not have this versatility. Adaptability of US stem from the possibility to choose the frequency. However different properties are measured depending on the frequency due to the heterogeneity of bone tissue. In the past years we have implemented a variety of US methods to measure bone. This includes (i) through-transmission and reflection methods dedicated to imaging bone elasticity with a resolution range 30micron-3mm; (ii) assessment of anisotropy from parallelepiped samples with various aspect ratios. We will present the recent developments and discuss the precision and accuracy of the methods.
Domaines
Acoustique [physics.class-ph]
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