The skull bone, a curved solid multilayered plate protecting the brain, constitutes a big challenge for the use of ultrasound-mediated techniques in neuroscience. Ultrasound waves incident from water or soft biological tissue are mostly reflected when impinging on the skull. To this end, skull properties have been characterized for both high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) operating in the narrowband far-field regime and optoacoustic imaging applications. Yet, no study has been conducted to characterize the near-field of water immersed skulls. We used the thermoelastic effect with a 532 nm pulsed laser to trigger a wide range of broad-band ultrasound modes in a mouse skull. In order to capture the waves propagating in the near-field, a thin hydrophone was scanned in close proximity to the skull's surface. While Leaky pseudo-Lamb waves and grazing-angle bulk water waves are clearly visible in the spatio-temporal data, we were only able to identify skull-guided acoustic waves after dispersion analysis in the wavenumber-frequency space. The experimental data was found to be in a reasonable agreement with a flat multilayered plate model.
展开▼
