Quantitative Ultrasound Images Generated by a PE-CMOS Sensor Array: Scatter Modeling and Image Restoration

摘要

In the projection geometry, the detected ultrasound energy through a soft-tissue is mainly attributed to the attenuated primary intensity and the scatter intensity. In order to extract ultrasound image of attenuated primary beam out of the detected raw data, the scatter component must be carefully quantified for restoring the original image. In this study, we have designed a set of apparatus to modeling the ultrasound scattering in soft-tissue. The employed ultrasound imaging device was a C-Scan (projection) prototype using a 4th generation PE-CMOS sensor array (model I400, by Imperium Inc., Silver Spring, MD) as the detector. Right after the plane wave ultrasound transmitting through a soft-tissue mimicking material (Zerdine, by CIRS Inc., Norfolk, VA), a ring aperture is used to collimate the signal before reaching the acoustic lens and the PE-CMOS sensor. Three sets of collimated ring images were acquired and analyzed to obtain the scattering components as a function of the off-center distance. Several pathological specimens and breast phantoms consisting of simulated breast tissue with masses, cysts and microcalcifications were imaged by the same C-Scan imaging prototype. The restoration of these ultrasound images were performed by using a standard deconvolution computation. Our study indicated that the resultant images show shaper edges and detailed features as compared to their unprocessed counterparts.