Ultrasonic Echosignal Applied to Human Skin Lesions Characterization

The paper presents a classification of the healthy skin and the skin lesions (basal cell carcinoma) basing
on a statistics of the envelope of ultrasonic echoes. The echoes envelopes distributions were modeled using
Rayleigh and K-distribution. The distributions were compared with empirical data to find which of them
better models the statistics of the echo-signal obtained from the human skin. The results indicated that
the K-distribution provides a better fit.
Also, a characteristic parameter of the K-distribution, the effective number of scatterers (M), was
investigated. The values of the M parameter, obtained for the skin cancer (basal cell carcinoma), were
lower as compared to those obtained for the healthy skin. The results indicate that the statistical quan-
titative ultrasound parameters have a potential for extracting information useful for characterization of
the skin condition.