Measurement of ultrasound phase velocity in trabecular bone using adaptive phase tracking

Ultrasound velocity (UV) is one of the most popular ultrasound properties in the assessment of bone status. The defining of the arrival time of ultrasound pulse transmitted through the bone is critical to the accuracy of UV measurement. The adaptive phase tracking method can measure the accurate arrival time of a specific frequency component from the broadband ultrasonic pulse through the detection of time dependent phase information. The phase UV derived from the method is objective and robust. When correlated with the stiffness of the trabecular bone from sheep femoral condyle, the phase UV in the trabecular bone obtained through this method has the highest correlation coefficient (r=0.84) compared to the group velocity (r=0.76) and the phase velocity from FFT analysis (r=0.14).