Early diagnosis of osteoporosis is crucial for preventing fractures and improving the quality of life of patients. In clinical practice, the mainstream diagnostic methods, such as dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), are limited by high equipment costs and ionizing radiation, resulting in a low coverage rate of large-scale early screening. Only less than one-third of brittle fracture patients have received a DXA assessment. To address this issue, this study proposes an innovative diagnostic method based on ultrasonic guided wave technology. This technology is cost-effective and portable, and it overcomes the limitations of X-ray detection in terms of its unsuitability for large-scale early diagnosis.
The Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio of water are similar to those of soft tissue, so this method utilizes water coupling to simulate the environment of soft tissue around the bone and combines the transverse isotropy of cortical bone, which is an important characteristic that most existing models ignore, to analyze the propagation of guided waves in anisotropic cortical bone. Through the processing of ultrasonic signals using two-dimensional short-time Fourier transform (2D-STFT), the local thickness of cortical bone can be inverted. By establishing a fluid-coupled orthotropic anisotropic plate model, deriving the dispersion equation, solving the theoretical method for the dispersion curve, using the bovine long plate to construct a water-coupled detection platform, and obtaining experimental data to invert the thickness of the bone plate, the local thickness of the bone plate was obtained, proving that this method can effectively reconstruct the thickness changes of anisotropic and variable cross-section cortical bone under simulated soft tissue conditions, with an average relative error of 13%. This lays the foundation for subsequent in vivo experiments and provides a reliable solution for large-scale early osteoporosis screening.