Statistical Modeling and Analysis of the Echo Envelope Distributions in Medical Ultrasound Imaging

• Activity Number: 693
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 8, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Imaging
• Author(s): Kaisheng Song*+
• Companies: University of North Texas
• Keywords: Ultrasound Imaging ; Envelope Distribution ; Parameter Estimation ; Hypothesis Testing

Abstract

Ultrasonic imaging is arguably the second most popular medical imaging modality today next only to conventional X-ray. B-mode ultrasound imaging is a widely used clinical diagnostic tool for the detection and identification of abnormalities in the liver, breast, and other organs/soft tissue structures in the human body. However, the presence of ultrasound speckle makes it difficult to visually or automatically interpret clinical ultrasound images. In this talk, we discuss some statistical issues in speckle analysis and present various existing approaches in modelling the envelope distribution of backscattered echo received from tissues. We propose a flexible family of envelope distributions, illustrate its finite sample performance in parameter estimation and testing, and demonstrate its effectiveness in analysis of B-scan ultrasound images. The proposed method provides a potentially powerful and practical procedure to be used in ultrasound image segmentation, tissue typing, and target identification.