Efficient dispersion analysis of guided waves in cortical bone

Guided wave propagation is at the heart of the axial transmission techniques designed to assess bone health status. The method involves matching observed and predicted dispersion characteristics of guided waves. The strength of the technique is that it can infer more than one bone property from the measured ultrasonic data, such as cortical thickness, stiffness, or porosity. The suitability of the model chosen for the inversion has recently been debated and the question has been raised whether the physical model must take the soft tissue coating influence into account as well as perhaps other factors such as bone curvature. We present in this talk a series of experiments conducted on bone-mimicking phantoms (plates or tubes) with or without soft tissue-mimicking coating showing evidence 1/ that the experimental guided wave branches in the range of 0.4-1.6 MHz mainly exhibit sensitivity to the influence of the solid subsystem (bone) and 2/ that a simple non absorbing transverse isotropic free plate model p...