Assessment of trabecular bone tissue elasticity with resonant ultrasound spectroscopy.

The material properties of the trabeculae (tissue-level properties), together with the trabecular architecture and the bone volume fraction determine the apparent millimetre-scale bone mechanical properties. We present a novel method to measure trabecular tissue elastic modulus E using resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS). The first mechanical resonance frequency f of a freestanding cuboid specimen is measured and used to back-calculate E.