Quantitative ultrasound technologies for osteoporosis diagnosis measure ultrasonic parameters such as speed of sound(SOS) and normalized broadband ultrasound attenuation(nBUA) in the calcaneus (heel bone). In the present study, the dependences of SOS and nBUA on bone mineral density in the proximal femur with high risk of fracture were investigated by using 20 trabecular bone samples extracted from bovine femurs. SOS and nBUA in the femoral trabecular bone samples were measured by using a transverse transmission method with one matched pair of ultrasonic transducers with a center frequency of 1.0 MHz. SOS and nBUA measured in the 20 trabecular bone samples exhibited high Pearson's correlation coefficients (r) of r = 0.83 and 0.72 with apparent bone density, respectively. The multiple regression analysis with SOS and nBUA as independent variables and apparent bone density as a dependent variable showed that the correlation coefficient r = 0.85 of the multiple linear regression model was higher than those of the simple linear regression model with either parameter SOS or nBUA as an independent variable. These high linear correlations between the ultrasonic parameters and the bone density suggest that the ultrasonic parameters measured in the femur can be useful for predicting the femoral bone mineral density.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of cortical bone on acoustic properties of trabecular bone, such as speed of sound (SOS) and normalized broadband ultrasound attenuation (nBUA), in bovine femur in vitro. Twelve trabecular bone samples and three cortical bone plates with thicknesses of 1.00, 1.47, and 2.00 mm were extracted from the proximal end of two bovine femurs. The correlations between acoustic properties and trabecular apparent bone density were also examined before and after attaching a cortical bone plate to the trabecular bone samples. SOS increased linearly with increasing thickness of the cortical plate attached to one side of ultrasonic incidence of the trabecular bone samples, whereas nBUA showed a nonlinear dependence on the thickness of the cortical plate. All the SOS (r = 0.95-0.97) and nBUA (r = 0.53-0.73) measurements with and without the cortical bone plate with various thicknesses were found to exhibit high correlations with the trabecular apparent bone density. These results imply that the acoustic properties measured in the femur with lateral cortical layers in vitro can be useful indices for the prediction of trabecular bone mineral density.

Speed of sound (SOS) was measured in 14 bovine femoral trabecular bone samples with and without the cortical endplates with various thicknesses of 1.00, 1.31, 1.47, 1.75, and 2.00 mm. The presence of the cortical endplates resulted in an increase in the mean SOS of 16 m/s (þ0.9%) to 91 m/s (þ5.3%). The mean SOS measured in the samples with and without the cortical endplates exhibited similar significant correlations with apparent bone density (r ¼ 0.86-0.91). All the SOS measurements were also found to be highly correlated with each other (r ¼ 0.89-0.99).