YANG Baiding TA De’an WANG Weiqi

(Department of Electronic Engineering, Fudan University Shanghai 200433)

Received Jul. 17, 2010

Revised Aug. 16, 2010

Abstract  Ultrasonic backscatter signals from the cancellous bone can be used to diagnose osteoporosis eddectively due to its ability to provide the information of bone microstructure. Mean trabecular bone spacing (MTBS) is one of the important parameters for characterization of bone microstructure. This paper proposed a MTBS estimating method based on the fundamental frequency estimation, which was applied to backscatter signals from simulations, and in vitro boving trabeculae. The estimated MTBS were compared with those of simplified inverse filter tracking (SIFT) algorithm and autoregressive (AR) cepstrum method. The results demonstrated that the proposed method is very robutst for the MTBS estimation with more precise estimates and smaller estimated variance in the presence of a small signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and a large scattering strength ratio of diffuse scatterers to regular ones.

PACS numbers: 43.35,43.40,43.80