Osteoporosis affects about 200 million subjects in the world and is responsible for 8.9 million fractures each year. The combined annual cost of all osteoporotic fractures in Europe has been estimated to be 30 billion Euros. The frequency of osteoporotic fractures is rising in many countries, in particular because of the increased longevity of the population. In Italy, around 4 million of women and more than 800,000 men are exposed to a high fracture risk. The National Healthcare System spends about 500 million Euros for hospitalization and chirurgical treatment of hip fractures and costs related to rehabilitation are even greater. The situation is more critical in southern Italy, where the incidence of elderly people is higher than in the other regions. Therefore, there is a strong need for the assessment of the best practices in prevention and treatment of osteoporosis. In this paper, after an overview of the socioeconomic impact of osteoporosis in Italy, with particular focus on Apulia region, the most important techniques used to assess the fracture risk are briefly described. In general, they fall into two major categories: physical measurement of skeletal mass and assessment of clinical risk factors. Moreover, the most commonly used pharmacological agents for the treatment of osteoporosis are reported. In conclusion, for a correct management of the disease, it would be necessary to encourage the widespread use of cheap and non-invasive screening techniques for early diagnosis of osteoporosis.

Developing and testing novel ultrasound (US) investigation methods can be made difficult by commercial US echographs. Typically, most devices can export only the echographic images, providing either beamformed RF or demodulated echo-signal for acquisition by an external PC. Powerful but portable high-level commercial integrated circuits would be required in order to obtain access to the raw RF signal. First examples of such systems for ultrasound research are available (i.e. FEMMINA, ULA OP), although they are still far from size minimization. In this work we present a compact platform, consisting of a dedicated electronic board to be coupled with the US beamformer through an integrated analog front-end. Our platform was designed in order to simultaneously manage the RF flow data and to satisfy the following requirements: 1) ensuring that the full dynamic range of analog to digital converter (ADC) is completely exploited in order to maintain the ADC resolution capabilities through an appropriate amplifier, 2) denoising the RF signal input by a specific designed filter, 3) limited size, 4) low cost and 5) plug-and-play connection to the PC via a further USB port. Also, a suitable custom-developed graphical user interface was developed, enabling signal visualization and management of signal processing algorithms through an external PC. The output of an equivalent system, composed by commercially available stand-alone amplifier and ADC components, was assumed as the standard for comparing and grading the performances of our board. Analyzing the output of both systems in the frequency domain, we obtained matching spectra with a difference up to 0.21 dB. The so realized close synergy between hardware and software allows the acquisition and real-time processing of the echographic RF signals with fast data representation, allowing for the complete analysis of particular phenomena upon the study of the interaction between US signals and the investigated target for specific clinical diagnosis (i.e. osteoporosis in the bone tissue, tissue typing applications).

Osteoporosis is considered as a major public health problem, second only to cardiovascular diseases. The gold standard for its diagnosis is currently represented by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which, however, suffers from some important drawbacks. In order to overcome such limitations, the use of ultrasound (US) techniques has been proposed. In this paper, a novel approach to the diagnosis of osteoporosis through US scans on lumbar spine and proximal femur is described. The approach relies on the estimation of diagnostic parameters by measuring the degree of similarity between the spectra of the raw radiofrequency (RF) echo signals and reference spectral models of osteoporotic or healthy bones. Reference models are representative of the features of either osteoporotic or healthy bone structures and are matched with subject age, sex, ethnic group and body mass index to take into account variations in bone physiological condition and subject anatomy. In this paper, the methods implemented to build the database of reference models and to estimate diagnostic parameters are presented. The performance of the approach was assessed on a total of 145 Caucasian underweight and normal-weighted women with age in the range from 46 to 55. Performance was assessed through direct comparison with DXA results. The obtained median relative error in the estimation of bone mineral density was as low as 9.1% on women aged 51 to 55 years and 12.0% on women with age in the range from 46 to 50 years. Moreover, for the two groups, the estimation error was lower than 20% for 81% and 78.6% of subjects, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method combines the advantages of the use of US techniques with a remarkable diagnostic accuracy, thus lending itself to the possibility of being used for population mass screenings.

This paper deals with new technologies today used to assess pain in patients with chronic pain. The author describes the state of art concerning the current scenario of pain assessment issue. Attention is focused on Quantitative Sensory Testing (QST) technology used to stimulate pain in order to evaluate the patient sensation and score the perceived pain level. In detail, QST can provide an understanding of the mechanisms involved in pain transduction, transmission, and perception under normal and pathophysiological conditions and provide mechanism-based diagnosis, prevention, and management of pain. A discussion on clinical applications of the above mentioned assessment technique is reported.

In the present work the performance of a low-cost ultrasonic rangefinder system exploiting linear chirp excitation signal and the Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave technique is analyzed, evaluated in terms of resolution and computational cost , and compared with the results achievable by means of the standard technique based on the matched-filter theory. The system, based on a Voltage Controlled Oscillator and an analog mixer, shifts some of the processing required by the FMCW protocol in the analog domain, strongly relaxing the requirements on the signal sampling rate without reducing the achievable range resolution. The final target is to evaluate the possibility of implementing the FMCW technique in very low cost and hand held devices.