Bio-material for Modulated Thermal Wave Imaging for Determining Bone Density: A Numerical Study

Bio-materials play a potentially advantageous role in the medical field for partially or; completely replacing a body part for better functionality or detection and healing of any disease or trauma. Research in the field of bio-materials encourages us for finding such materials which satisfies the ever-increasing need for a safer, longer-lasting implant inside the human body. Bio-material should be supportive of non-invasive methods of disease detection. Further, it is also important that effective and early detection of diseases for safety and increased survival probability. Hence, we required a technique that has the capability to the early and effective diagnosis of the diseases such as active infrared thermography. Active thermography is a Nondestructive technique utilized external heat simulation and recorded surface temperature variation for diagnosis. However, this technique shows promising results that employing this method, bone disorders can be detected in their earliest stages. This is because active thermography is a non-invasive and radiation-free functional imaging method used as an alternative to conventional diagnostic techniques like X-ray, ultrasound, MRI etc. However, its resolution is low because of its shallow penetration into the body. Nonetheless, using a thermal excitation with modulation to increase deep penetration along with different post-processing techniques is used, it is still limited. Hence in this work utilized bio-material coating along with modulated thermal wave techniques along with pulse compression technique. This work focuses on testing the effect of bio-material coating on the bone specimen for thermographic image resolution of bone with different density variations and thermal properties using the three-dimensional FEM model. Further, we compare the coated and noncoated resolution based on SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). In this work, we use Silver Nano-particle coating which serves as a promising bio-material for its excellent antibacterial properties and its, high thermal properties help in enhancing the resolution of thermographic images.