Broadband ultrasound attenuation measurement of long bone using peak frequency of the echoes.

The traditional peak frequency formulation requires the knowledge of the signal wavelet. We improved and applied the method to estimate attenuation for homogeneous silicon rubber and bovine cortical bone without recourse to the wavelet assumption. The estimated values for rubber and bone samples are 6.59 +/- 0.28 dB/MHz/cm and 4.59 +/- 1.09 dB/MHz/cm, respectively, as compared with 6.33 +/- 0.19 dB/ MHz/cm and 5.00 +/- 1.10 dB/MHz/cm, respectively, by the spectral ratio method.