A simulation study on the characteristics of spatial coherence to a scattering medium in ultrasound

Spatial coherence in ultrasound has been used to characterize the microstructure and evaluate the local anisotropy of biological tissues. However, a simulation framework for verifying spatial coherence properties is lacking to understand the spatial coherence in function of the imaging parameters. In this paper, we propose a simulation framework that confirms that spatial coherence mainly reflects the properties of the auto-correlation function of the scatterers, which is related to the distribution of the scatterers. We also use the framework to demonstrate that the transmitted aperture size determines the width of the spatial coherence function, which can help to select the optimal parameters for evaluating the coherence of the received signal on the array. We also verify that the spatial coherence function is independent of depth and that the information of the medium is obtained from the transmitted beamwidth.