Shapes and distributions of soft tissue scatterers

What causes scattering of ultrasound from normal soft tissues such as the liver, thyroid, and prostate? Commonly, the answer is formulated around the properties of spherical scatterers, related to cellular shapes and sizes. However, an alternative view is that the closely packed cells forming the tissue parenchyma create the reference media, and the long cylindrical-shaped fluid vessels serve as the scattering sites. Under a weak scattering or Born approximation for the extracellular fluid in the vessels, and assuming an isotropic distribution of cylindrical channels across a wide range of diameters, consistent with a fractal branching pattern, some simple predictions can be made about the nature of backscatter as a function of frequency in soft tissues. Specifically, a number of plausible shapes would predict that backscatter increases as a power law of frequency, where the power law is determined by the function governing the number density of the vessels versus diameter. These results are compared with some historical models developed over the last 100 years in scattering theory and point to the need for higher spatial resolution and higher bandwidths to obtain more precise measures of the key parameters in normal tissues, and to better identify the dominant structures responsible for backscatter in everyday clinical imaging.