Schätzung der Gewebeabsorption aus medizinischen Ultraschall-Bildern

Ultrasound as a mechanical wave propagating in tissue is influenced by the locally prevailing acousto-mechanical conditions in its propagation behavior. By appropriate processing of the backscattered signals received by the ultrasonic transducer, tissue parameters such as locally acting bulk modulus, mass density, speed of sound, isotropic scattering coefficient, but also the locally acting tissue absorption can be estimated. A discipline that has received increasing attention in the medical utrasonic imaging discipline and its scientific publications in recent years is quantitative ultrasound (QUS) which tries to estimate with great accuracy these local acting tissue parameters. In this article, we analyze different algorithms for estimating highly spatially resolved tissue absorption parameters. It has been shown that color coded overlays of tissue attenuation over conventional B-mode ultrasonic images that show the morphology only, are of great diagnostic value.