Abstract:
The societal impact of age-related bone loss is constantly increasing. 4 to 6 million U.S. women have osteoporosis, and 13 to 17 million have osteopenia. Osteoporosis modifies cortical bone mass through a thinning of the cortex, as well as changes in porosity. In osteoporotic cortical bone, pore diameter and pore density are larger on average.
Ultrasound is highly attractive because it is non-invasive, widely available and relatively inexpensive. Therefore, this imaging modality holds more promise than any other for screening osteoporosis. There are however major drawbacks to conventional ultrasound methods: they lack specificity, remain qualitative, and are unsuitable for a complex heterogeneous organ such as bone.
It is however possible to leverage the complexity of ultrasound propagation in complex media to find new sources of contrast. When ultrasound waves propagate in such complex media, diffusion processes and multiple scattering occur. By exploiting these phenomena and modeling scattering and attenuation of ultrasound in bone tissue rather than simply relying on echolocation, one can retrieve properties that allow the quantitative characterization of tissue microstructure. We will show how these mechanisms can be used to evaluate osteoporosis and characterize random complex media.
Biography:
Omid Yousefian received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology in Isfahan, Iran in 2013, his M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC in 2015. He is currently a Ph.D Candidate at NC State University and has been working on elastic wave propagation in complex heterogeneous media, with applications to tissue characterization.
