The University of British Columbia

Detection of bone surfaces in ultrasound images would be useful for ultrasound guided orthopedic surgery, biopsy and brachytherapy. However, bones are often poorly visualized with conventional B-mode ultrasound due to speckle, shadowing, reverberation and other artifacts in tissue. In this paper, we investigate two new techniques for the enhancement of bone surface visualization using ultrasound radio frequency (RF) signals, instead of using conventional B-mode images. The first approach uses strain imaging or elastography, and the second method directly monitors the reflected power of the RF signal. The potential of the proposed methods is demonstrated through phantom and in vivo experiments. Experimental results show that the two methods produce satisfactory contrast between bone surfaces and soft tissue, and are suitable for real-time applications. The good performance of these approaches suggests that they have promise in a clinical setting.