New technology developed in the United States allows ultrasound to easily penetrate bones and metal

    Ultrasonic technology is widely used in medicine and industry, but it will be deflected or distorted when it encounters metal and bone. Researchers at North Carolina State University in the United States have recently used metamaterials and a special structure to compensate for the ultrasonic distortion phenomenon that often occurs in previous experiments, and developed a technology that allows ultrasonic waves to easily pass through metal and bone.

New technology allows ultrasound to easily penetrate bone and metal

    The relevant paper was published online on the website of the open access journal Physical Review X.

    Ultrasound imaging works by emitting high-frequency sound waves and capturing their reflections. When the sound waves hit an object, they bounce back and are then returned to the ultrasound device to be converted into an image. However, some materials, such as bone or metal, have physical properties that can block or distort ultrasound waves.

    The Physicists' Organization Network recently reported that in order to allow ordinary ultrasound to easily penetrate bones and metals, scientists at North Carolina State University used metamaterials to design a unique structure to offset the acoustic characteristics of such materials. This metamaterial structure uses a series of membrane and tubular structures. The researchers used computational simulation experimental technology to test the prototype of this technology. In the simulation, when this technology was not used, only 28% of the energy of ultrasound could penetrate bones; with the intervention of the metamaterial structure, the energy of ultrasound that penetrated bones eventually reached 88%.

    Jing Yun, the first author of the paper and an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, said that this technology can make the application of ultrasound diagnosis more extensive, such as monitoring blood flow in the brain, or using ultrasound outside the skull to burn brain tumors, which was very difficult in the past because the skull distorts the ultrasound sound field. In addition, this technology can also be used in industry. For example, this technology can be used to detect cracks under the surface metal of aircraft wings that were previously extremely difficult to detect.