Archives of Acoustics, 39, 4, pp. 519-527, 2014
10.2478/aoa-2014-0056

Spatial and Frequency Compounding in Application to Attenuation Estimation in Tissue

Ziemowit KLIMONDA
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
Poland

Jerzy LITNIEWSKI
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
Poland

Piotr KARWAT
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
Poland

Andrzej NOWICKI
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
Poland

The soft tissue attenuation is an interesting parameter from medical point of view, because the value of attenuation coefficient is often related to the state of the tissue. Thus, the imaging of the attenuation coefficient distribution within the tissue could be a useful tool for ultrasonic medical diagnosis. The method of attenuation estimation based on tracking of the mean frequency changes in a backscattered signal is presented in this paper. The attenuation estimates are characterized by high variance due to stochastic character of the backscattered ultrasonic signal and some special methods must be added to data processing to improve the resulting images. The following paper presents the application of
Spatial Compounding (SC), Frequency Compounding (FC) and the combination of both. The resulting parametric images are compared by means of root-mean-square errors. The results show that combined SC and FC techniques significantly improve the quality and accuracy of parametric images of attenuation distribution.
Keywords: tissue attenuation estimation, parametric imaging, synthetic aperture, spatial compounding, frequency compounding
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Copyright © Polish Academy of Sciences & Institute of Fundamental Technological Research (IPPT PAN).

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DOI: 10.2478/aoa-2014-0056