Diagnostic ultrasound artifacts during imaging of two-body interfaces: part 1--wavelength resonance

A diagnostic ultrasound technique is to be developed for measuring surface contact areas at the tibio-femoral interface of a total knee replacement in an in vitro industrial engineering setting as a design tool. As a first step, a previous study mathematically characterized the ultrasound behaviour expected at a two-body circular-on-flat interface of known geometry. In the current investigation, a series of test objects was constructed and imaged to experimentally validate the theoretical contact models. Specifically, several unique metal-on-polymer test objects, whose interfaces were point, non-point, and circular contact areas, were ultrasonically imaged. The effects of interface geometry, ultrasound resonance wavelength, lambda/2, and compressive load were studied.