Offering inexpensive, widely available and safe method to evaluate the bone condition
as a prevention step to predict bone fracture which caused by Osteoporosis disease
makes ultrasound becomes an alternative method beside X-ray based bone
densitometry. Conventional quantitative ultrasound (QUS) applies the analysis of
attenuation and velocity to estimate bone health with several measurement
techniques which analyzes different types of ultrasound waves and bones. However,
most of the QUS results still does not match the accuracy of the Dual X-ray
absorptiometry due to the interaction of ultrasound and bone microstructure are not
fully exploited. The Biot’s theory has predicted that, porous medium like a cancellous
bone supporting two types of longitudinal wave known as fast and slow wave which
depends on the type of medium travelled. Both experiment and simulation were
conducted to investigate the correlation of fast and slow waves individually with a
variety of cancellous bone condition. Some of the analysis methods are based on
conventional QUS methods. The fast and slow wave relates more to the microstructure
of the cancellous bone compared to overall waves. In addition, overall waves had been
proven to consist of fast and slow wave and can be separated using Bayesian methods.
Overall waves also found to suffer artifact such as phase cancellation and negative
dispersion that could cause confusion in analyzing the parameters of ultrasound wave
with bone structure. In vivo application based on fast and slow wave analysis is able to
produce results based on mass density which can be compared directly and have high
correlation with X-ray based bone densitometry. The recent backscattered simulation
result indicates that, fast and slow waves can be reflected inside the cancellous bone
might offer a new method to evaluate bone especially in crucial skeletal parts.