Unifying Concepts of Statistical and Spectral Quantitative Ultrasound Techniques

Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) techniques using radiofrequency (RF) backscattered signals have been used for tissue characterization of numerous organ systems. One approach is to use the magnitude and frequency dependence of backscatter echoes to quantify tissue structures. Another approach is to use first-order statistical properties of the echo envelope as a signature of the tissue microstructure. We propose a unification of these QUS concepts. For this purpose, a mixture of homodyned K-distributions is introduced to model the echo envelope, together with an estimation method and a physical interpretation of its parameters based on the echo signal spectrum. In particular, the total, coherent and diffuse signal powers related to the proposed mixture model are expressed explicitly in terms of the structure factor previously studied to describe the backscatter coefficient (BSC). Then, this approach is illustrated in the context of red blood cell (RBC) aggregation. It is experimentally shown that the total, coherent and diffuse signal powers are determined by a structural parameter of the spectral Structure Factor Size and Attenuation Estimator. A two-way repeated measures ANOVA test showed that attenuation (p-value of 0.077) and attenuation compensation (p-value of 0.527) had no significant effect on the diffuse to total power ratio. These results constitute a further step in understanding the physical meaning of first-order statistics of ultrasound images and their relations to QUS techniques. The proposed unifying concepts should be applicable to other biological tissues than blood considering that the structure factor can theoretically model any spatial distribution of scatterers.