LAUSR

Ultrasound attenuation coefficient (α) has shown a potential to provide quantitative information on the pathological state of the tissue. However, the main difficulty in the estimation of α consists in the need for diffraction correction that is currently done by means of a reference measurement. Previously, we proposed an alternative attenuation reconstruction technique, wherein the attenuation coefficient was estimated by iteratively solving the forward wave propagation problem and matching the simulated signals to measured ones. The simulation procedure involved modeling of the diffraction effects and allowed to avoid several assumptions made by conventional methods. The proposed method showed promising results when applied to the data recorded using a single-element transducer. In the present study, this methodology was extended to a case of a clinically used phased array transducer. The proposed approach was validated on simulated in Field II data and data recorded in a tissue mimicking phantom with ...