Effect of Intervening Tissue Layers on Quantitative Ultrasound Measurement: A Phantom Study

Recent advances in regularization-based Quantitative Ultrasound (QUS) techniques have significantly improved the QUS estimation resolution and quality. Further investigations, such as the effect of intervening layers, are needed to enable the clinical adoption of QUS techniques. In this work, we studied the effect of intervening tissue layers on the QUS estimates, namely, attenuation coefficient and backscatter coefficient, obtained using a regularization-based method. Further, we investigated the effect of the region-of-interest dimension on these QUS estimates. We evaluated our study using three configurations (no intervening layer, one intervening layer, and two intervening layers) and three region-of-interest dimensions (100 scanlines × 500 samples, 50 scanlines × 400 samples, and 25 scanlines × 300 samples) on tissue-mimicking phantoms. Our study exhibited that the variance in attenuation coefficient estimate and backscatter coefficient increase with the increase in the number of intervening layers, which is further pronounced for smaller region-of-interest.