Study on Measuring BUA of Cancellous Bone Based on M-Sequence Signal

Broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA) is a useful predictor of the mechanical properties of cancellous bone. It is obtained by ultrasound pulse wave through-transmission measurements into the bone. Due to the strong attenuation in the bone, the received signal is weak and intervened with noise, which confines the measured depth and brings estimation errors. An effective solution to this is the coded signal excitation technique. In our study, we introduced to the BUA measurement the M-sequence for its excellent autocorrelation, which is widely used in communication. The received signal passes through a matched filter corresponding to the excitation M-sequence, and the results is better. Compared to pulse wave transmission and other coded excitation methods, the proposed method has especially good accuracy with high SNR and the low power requirement.