Ultrasonic wave propagation in stereo-lithographical bone replicas.

Predictions of a modified anisotropic Biot-Allard theory are compared with measurements of pulses centered on 100 kHz and 1 MHz transmitted through water-saturated stereo-lithographical bone replicas. The replicas are 13 times larger than the original bone samples. Despite the expected effects of scattering, which is neglected in the theory, at 100 kHz the predicted and measured transmitted waveforms are similar. However, the magnitude of the leading negative edge of the waveform is overpredicted, and the trailing parts of the waveforms are not predicted well. At 1 MHz, although there are differences in amplitudes, the theory predicts that the transmitted waveform is almost a scaled version of that incident in conformity with the data.