Bone scanner for examination of deeply located trabecular bones

The ultrasonic scanner dedicated for acquiring the RF echoes, backscattered from the trabecular bone, was developed. The device is based on the concept of minimizing of electronics and computations executed solely in the main computer processor and the graphics card. The electronic module of encoder-digitizer - executing all the transmission and reception functions - is based on a single low-cost FPGA chip. The scanner is equipped with the mechanical sector scan probe with a concave transducer with 50 mm focal length, center frequency of 1.5 MHz and 60 % bandwidth at - 6 dB. The example of femoral neck bone examination shows that the scanner can provide ultrasonic data from deeply located bones with the ultrasound penetrating the trabecular bone up to the depth of 20 mm. It was also presented that the RF echo-data acquired with the scanner allow for the estimation of sound attenuation in trabecular bone.