An Absolute Measurement of Backscattering Coefficients for Excised Human Tissues and Its Relevance to Abdominal Imaging

Abstract

Although the major proportion of diagnostic ultrasound techniques are based upon the exploitation of scattering processes a rigorous quantitative evaluation of the scattering of ultrasound by human tissues is a topic which has received very little attention to date. Not only are the data sparse but the existing references tend to be implicit rather than explicit. Despite a recent interest in the frequency dependence of scattering measurements only a few workers have evaluated an absolute measurement for the differential scattering coefficient as a function of frequency for soft biological tissues (Nicholas, 1976b, 1981; Shung and Reid, 1977; Freese and Lyons, 1977, and Kadaba et al., 1980). Other researchers have investigated scattering both as a function of frequency (Chivers et al., 1973; Chivers and Hill, 1975b, and Lizzi and Elbaum, 1979) and angle of scattering (Waag et al., 1976; Lele et al., 1976, and Nassiri et al., 1978) but have only produced relative measurements.