ULTRASOUND ECHO SIGNAL ANALYSIS AND TISSUE HISTOLOGY

描述(改编自申请者摘要)：统计时刻 来自软组织等介质的超声回波携带一些信息 关于组织潜在的随机散射微结构。这些 然而，矩也取决于仪器相关的因素，例如 系统分辨率单元体积(轴向分辨率和横向分辨率)。第一 因此，任务是消除这种影响。为了实现这一目标， 并提取更多关于组织微结构的定量信息 正在研究中的一种多带宽、多光谱脉冲探测技术 是提议的。回波信号归一化二阶矩的变化 强度作为细胞体积和光谱含量的函数进行了检查 探测到的脉搏。独立的细胞体积测量提供了基础 用于提取稳健的特征，如截距和直线斜率 二次归一化矩与细胞体积图的逆。这两个 这些功能在区分三种不同的 海绵结构(孔径从2毫米到0.5毫米不等)。一个基本的理由是 提出软组织，特别是肝组织，有散布 研究了类似于海绵结构的微观结构。因此，一位少校 目的是将这项技术应用于切除的肝脏和乳腺组织。 样本。组织切片被认为是组织的黄金标准 病理学。因此，第二个主要目标是建立一座 对组织组织学与组织病理学定量分析的认识 回声信号。一种数学组织建模和模拟过程 使用正在研究的组织的微结构作为输入来开发。 这些信息是从组织切片中获得的。Moments of the 对模拟的回波信号进行分析，并与实验结果进行比较 在真正的纸巾上。模型可以以迭代的方式更新，直到一些 达成了合理的协议水平。最后，第三个主要目标 就是确定所提出的方法是否具有足够的敏感性 区分“正常”组织和病理组织。

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Applicant's Abstract): Statistical moments of ultrasound echoes from a medium such as soft tissue carry some information about the underlying random scattering microstructure of the tissue. These moments also depend on instrument dependent factors, however, such as the system resolution cell volume (axial and lateral resolution). The first task, therefore, is to remove this influence. To achieve this objective, and to extract more quantitative information about the tissue microstructure under investigation, a multibandwidth, multispectral pulse probing technique is proposed. The variation of the 2nd normalized moment of the echo signal intensity is examined as a function of cell volume and spectral content of the probed pulse. Independent cell volume measurements provide the basis for extracting robust features such as intercept and straight line slope on 2nd normalized moment verses inverse of cell volume plots. These two features are shown to be useful in differentiating between three different sponge structures (pore size varying form 2 mm to 0.5 mm). A rationale is presented that soft tissue, particularly liver tissue, has a scattering microstructure similar to the sponge structure studied. Therefore, a major objective is to apply this technique to excised liver and breast tissue samples. Histologic sections are considered the gold standard for tissue pathology. Therefore, the second major objective is to build a "bridge of understanding" between tissue histology and the quantitative analysis of the echo signal. A mathematical tissue modeling and simulation procedure has been developed using the microstructure of the tissue under study as input. This information is obtained from histologic sections. Moments of the simulated echo signal will be analyzed and compared to experimental results on real tissue. The model can be updated in an iterative fashion until some reasonable level of agreement is achieved. Finally, a third major objective is to determine whether the proposed methods have enough sensitivity to distinguish between "normal" and pathological tissue.