Articles 2006

Résumé: Numerical simulation of wave propagation is performed through 31 3D volumes of trabecular bone. These volumes were reconstructed from high synchrotron microtomography experiments and are used as the input geometry in a simulation software developed in our laboratory. The simulation algorithm accounts for propagation into both the saturating fluid and bone but absorption is not taken into account. We show that 3D simulation predicts phenomena observed experimentally in trabecular bones : linear frequency dependence of attenuation, increase of attenuation and speed of sound with the bone volume fraction, negative phase velocity dispersion in most of the specimens, propagation of fast and slow wave depending on the orientation of the trabecular network compared to the direction of propagation of the ultrasound. Moreover, the predicted attenuation is in very close agreement with the experimental one measured on the same specimens. Coupling numerical simulation with real bone architecture therefore provides a powerful tool to investigate the physics of ultrasound propagation in trabecular structures. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Résumé: In standard near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM), a subwavelength probe acts as an optical 'stethoscope' to map the near field produced at the sample surface by external illumination. This technique has been applied using visible, infrared, terahertz and gigahertz radiation to illuminate the sample, providing a resolution well beyond the diffraction limit. NSOM is well suited to study surface waves such as surface plasmons or surface-phonon polaritons. Using an aperture NSOM with visible laser illumination, a near-field interference pattern around a corral structure has been observed, whose features were similar to the scanning tunnelling microscope image of the electronic waves in a quantum corral. Here we describe an infrared NSOM that operates without any external illumination: it is a near-field analogue of a night-vision camera, making use of the thermal infrared evanescent fields emitted by the surface, and behaves as an optical scanning tunnelling microscope. We therefore term this instrument a 'thermal radiation scanning tunnelling microscope' (TRSTM). We show the first TRSTM images of thermally excited surface plasmons, and demonstrate spatial coherence effects in near-field thermal emission. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group.

Résumé: A method for tracking locally the 3D motion of biological tissues is developed and applied to the correction of motion during high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) therapy. The motion estimation technique is based on an accurate ultrasonic speckle tracking method. A pulse-echo sequence is performed for a subset of the transducers of a phased array. For each of these sub-apertures, the displacement is estimated by computing the 1D cross-correlation of the backscattered signals acquired at two consecutive times. The local 3D motion vector is then computed using a inversion algorithm. This technique is experimentally validated in vivo on anesthetized pigs. The 3D motion of liver tissues is tracked in real-time. The technique is combined with HIFU sequences and a real-time feedback correction of the HIFU beam is achieved by adjusting the delays of each channel. The sonications "locked on target" are interleaved with very motion estimation sequences.

Résumé: In this letter, an innovative way of imaging transient and local shear vibrations of an in vivo contracting muscle is proposed. The principle is to use an ultrafast ultrasound scanner (up to 5000 frames s-1) able to follow with a submillimeter resolution the motion of the muscle tissue in a two dimensional plane. This ultrafast echographic imaging technique leads to both local and transient in vivo studies of the contraction of a muscle as reported by these first experiments done on the biceps brachii. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.

Résumé: A technique to assess qualitatively the presence of higher-order viscoelastic parameters is presented. Low-frequency, monochromatic elastic waves are emitted into the material via an external vibrator. The resulting steady-state motion is detected in real time via an ultra fast ultrasound system using classical, one-dimensional (1-D) ultrasound speckle correlation for motion estimation. Total data acquisition lasts only for about 250 ms. The spectrum of the temporal displacement data at each image point is used for analysis. The presence of nonlinear effects is detected by inspection of the ratio of the second harmonics amplitude with respect to the total amplitude summed up to the second harmonic. Results from a polyacrylamide-based phantom indicate a linear response (i.e., the absence of higher harmonics) for this type of material at 65 Hz mechanical vibration frequency and about 100 μm amplitude. A lesion, artificially created by injection of glutaraldehyde into a beef specimen, shows the development of higher harmonics at the location of injection as a function of time. The presence of upper harmonics is clearly evident at the location of a malignant lesion within a mastectomy. © 2006 IEEE.

Résumé: Ultrasonic brain imaging remains difficult and limited because of the strong aberrating effects of the skull (absorption, diffusion and refraction of ultrasounds): high resolution transcranial imaging would require adaptive focusing techniques in order to correct the defocusing effect of the skull. In this paper, a noninvasive brain imaging device is presented. It is made of two identical linear arrays of 128 transducers located on each side of the skull. It is possible to separate the respective influence of the two bone windows on the path of an ultrasonic wave propagating from one array to the other, and thus estimate at each frequency the attenuation and phase shift locally induced by each bone window. The information obtained on attenuation and phase is used to correct the wave fronts that have to be sent through the skull in order to obtain a good focusing inside the skull. Compared to uncorrected wave fronts, the spatial shift of the focal spot is corrected, the width of the focal spot is reduced, and the sidelobes level is decreased up to 17 dB. Transcranial images of a phantom are presented and exhibit the improvement in image quality provided by this new noninvasive adaptive focusing method. © 2006 Acoustical Society of America.

Résumé: We propose to use a Nomarski imaging interferometer to measure the out-of-plane displacement field of micro-electro-mechanical systems. It is shown that the measured optical phase arises from both height and slope gradients. By using four integrating buckets, a more efficient approach to unwrap the measured phase is presented, thus making the method well suited for highly curved objects. Slope and height effects are then decoupled by expanding the displacement field on a functions basis, and the inverse transformation is applied to get a displacement field from a measured optical phase map change with a mechanical loading. A measurement reproducibility of approximately 10 pm is achieved, and typical results are shown on a microcantilever under thermal actuation, thereby proving the ability of such a setup to provide a reliable full-field kinematic measurement without surface modification. © 2006 Optical Society of America.

Résumé: Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging technique for imaging of biological media with micrometer-scale resolution, whose most significant impact concerns ophthalmology. Since its introduction in the early 1990's, OCT has known a lot of improvements and sophistications. Full-field OCT is our original approach of OCT, based on white-light interference microscopy. Tomographic images are obtained by combination of interferometric images recorded in parallel by a detector array such as a CCD camera. Whereas conventional OCT produces B-mode (axially-oriented) images like ultrasound imaging, full-field OCT acquires tomographic images in the en face (transverse) orientation. Full-field OCT is an alternative method to con-ventional OCT to provide ultrahigh resolution images (∼ 1 μm), using a simple halogen lamp instead of a complex laser-based source. Various studies have been carried, demonstrating the performances of this technology for three-dimensional imaging of ex vivo specimens. Full-field OCT can be used for non-invasive histological studies without sample preparation. In vivo imaging is still difficult because of the object motions. A lot of efforts are currently devoted to overcome this limitation. Ultra-fast full-field OCT was recently demonstrated with unprecedented image acquisition speed, but the detection sensitivity has still to be improved. Other research directions include the increase of the imaging penetration depth in highly scattering biological tissues such as skin, and the exploitation of new contrasts such as optical bire-fringence to provide additional information on the tissue morphology and composition.

Résumé: Experimental measurements of the coherent wave transmission for ultrasonic waves propagating in water through a random set of scatterers (metallic rods) are presented. Though the densities are moderate (6% and 14%) the experimental results show that the mean-free path deviates from the classical first-order approximation due to the existence of correlations between scatterers. Theoretical results for the mean free path obtained from different approaches are compared to the experimental measurements. The best agreement is obtained with the second-order diagrammatic expansion of the self-energy. © 2006 The American Physical Society.

Résumé: The use of a confocal detection scheme in a dual-beam thermal-lens microscope is presented. It allows the measurement of absorption factors smaller than 10 -6 using a heating laser power of 100 mW incident on the sample. A simple mathematical model based on gaussian beam propagation is presented that takes into account the main features of the instrument: the confocal detection scheme and the presence of chromatic aberrations in the objective lenses, and that allows to estimate the sensitivity and resolution of the instrument. This model is validated by experimental measurements on different test samples. Results are presented that prove a 450 nm axial resolution when using a NA = 1.2 water immersion objective lens. © 2006 The Japan Society of Applied Physics.

Résumé: We present a direct comparison between numerical simulation of wave propagation, performed through 28 volumes of trabecular bone, and the corresponding experimental data obtained on the same specimens. The volumes were reconstructed from high resolution synchrotron microtomography experiments and were used as the input geometry in a three-dimensional (3D) finite-difference simulation tool developed in our laboratory. The version of the simulation algorithm that was used accounts for propagation in both the saturating fluid and bone, and does not take absorption into account. This algorithm has been validated in a previous paper [Bossy et al.: Med. Biol. 50 (2005) 5545] for simulation of wave propagation through trabecular bone. Two quantitative ultrasound parameters were studied at 1 MHz for both simulated and experimental signals: the normalized slope of the frequency dependent attenuation coefficient (also called normalized broadband ultrasound attenuation (nBUA) in the medical field), and the phase velocity at the center frequency. We show that the simulated and experimental nBUA are in close agreement, especially for the high porosity specimens. For specimens with a low porosity (or a high solid volume fraction), the simulation systematically underestimate the experimentally observed nBUA. This result suggests that the relative contribution of scattering and absorption to nBUA may vary with the bone volume fraction. A linear relationship is found between experimental and simulated phase velocity. Simulated phase velocity is found to be slightly higher than the experimental one, but this may be explained by the choice of material properties used for the simulation. © 2006 The Japan Society of Applied Physics.

Résumé: In this letter, we describe experiments on the generation of the first order symmetric (S 1) Lamb mode by a pulsed yttrium aluminum garnet laser. The vibration of the plate is detected at the same point by a heterodyne interferometer. The acoustic signal is dominated by the resonance at the point of the dispersion curve where the group velocity vanishes. The time decay of the signal leads to the local attenuation coefficient of the material. The spectrum exhibits a very sharp peak, the frequency of which is sensitive to the plate thickness. For a 0.49-mm-thick Duralumin plate, thickness variations as small as 0.1 μm have been detected. Moving the detection point away from the source allows us to record the standing wave pattern resulting from the interference between the S 1 and S 2b Lamb waves having opposite wave vectors at the zero group velocity point. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.

Résumé: A procedure for taking the irreducible representations of subperiodic rod groups from tables of irreducible representations of three-periodical space groups is derived. Examples demonstrating the use of this procedure and derivation of selection rules for direct and phonon assisted electrical dipole transitions are presented. © Pleiades Publishing, Inc., 2006.

Résumé: In this article, we will show that the absolute temperature of electrical components under test can be measured with an infrared camera. An easy and cost-effective modification of the optical set-up and a software correction of the artefacts induced by the modification of the aperture of the objective allow to improve the spatial resolution. Calibrations with a Peltier system allow to obtain quantitative measurements. Consequently, it becomes easy to obtain a mapping of the absolute temperature of the surface of an integrated circuit from its infrared radiation, independently of its surface emissivity with a spatial resolution better than 40 μm. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Résumé: The acoustic nonlinear parameter, B/A, is an important piece of data whenever high intensity pressure fields are under consideration. In this work, an alternative method is proposed to measure this parameter. First, the method involves measuring the sound velocity and nonlinear waveform distortion of a finite amplitude plane wave propagating through a medium, Butanediol, whose density and attenuation law have been preliminarily determined. Measurements were performed in the nearfield of a piston where plane wave propagation regime exists. Impulse response of the hydrophone was determined and pressure waveforms were obtained by a convolution process. Then, the method involves modeling, in time domain and under experimental conditions, the theoretical nonlinear waveform distortion and fitting it to the experimental results by adjusting the B/A parameter. Comparative measurements were performed using the technique of parametric interaction. The respective results for the two methods (B/A=11.0±10% and 10.9±5%) are in a good agreement despite a smaller degree of accuracy for the proposed method. © 2006 Acoustical Society of America.

Résumé: In this letter, time reversal is applied to wideband electromagnetic waves in a reverberant room. To that end a multiantenna time reversal mirror (TRM) has been built. A 150 MHz bandwidth pulse at a central frequency of 2.45 GHz is radiated by a monopolar antenna, spread in time due to reverberation, recorded at the TRM, time reversed, and retransmitted. The time-reversed wave converges back to its source and focus in both time and space. The time compression is studied versus the number of antennas in the TRM and its bandwidth. The focal spot is also measured thanks to an eight-channel receiving array. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.

Résumé: In this Letter, we experimentally investigate time reversal focusing through a phononic crystal consisting of a periodic square arrangement of steel rods in water. An acoustic pulse is transmitted through the medium, received at a transducer array, time reversed and backpropagated. Both spatial focusing and time compression are studied and compared with those obtained through an equivalent disordered medium. With the phononic crystal, we do not observe the "hyperfocusing effect" that is typical of time reversal through disordered samples. © 2006 The American Physical Society.

Résumé: The full geometrical symmetry groups of zinc oxide nanowires, nanotubes, nanosprings and nanorings are found and some physical properties which can be deduced from the symmetry are discussed: conserved quantum numbers and band degeneracies; dynamical representations, Raman and infrared active modes; piezoelectric tensor. © 2006 IOP Publishing Ltd.

Résumé: Ultrasound waves can be focused by multichannel arrays through heterogeneous media using a time-reversal focusing method. In this method, it is required that a reference signal be either sent by a small active source embedded in the medium or backscattered by a strong scatterer acting as a passive source. The potential of this method in ultrasonic medical imaging has been already envisioned for aberration corrections. However, in many practical situations it is not possible to insert an active source in the medium or to rely on the presence of a unique strong scatterer in order to generate the reference signal. Analogous to the field of adaptive optics in astronomy, we propose here to create artificial "ultrasonic stars" in the body. The trick consists of first creating a bubble inside the medium using a section of the ultrasonic array. Due to cavitation, the bubble generates a spherical wave that propagates through a heterogeneous medium to the ultrasound array. The time-reversal method is then applied to the ultrasonic wave received by the array. This technique is experimentally validated for aberrations corrections in tissue mimicking phantoms. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.