Evaluation of ultrasonic texture and spectral parameters for coagulated tissue characterization

Radiofrequency ablation is a well established, minimally invasive approach for the treatment of tumors. However, at present there is a lack of suitable imaging modalities for accurate online monitoring of the coagulation process. The aim of this work is to evaluate the potential of various tissue characterizing ultrasonic parameters from spectral and spatial domain to differentiate between coagulated and noncoagulated tissue. The calculated parameters include first and second order texture parameters, estimates of attenuation coefficients, spectral parameters (slope, intercept and midband value) and coefficients of autoregressive spectral estimates. As a measure of selectivity of each parameter the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was utilized. The best performing parameters can be used to be processed by a classification system.