Detecting and estimating structure regularity of soft tissue organs from ultrasound images

This paper deals with the problem of detecting and estimating the scatterer spacing between the regularly-spaced resolvable coherent scatterers found in tissue. This parameter has been successfully used in classifying tissue structure, in differentiating between normal and cirrhotic liver, and in detecting diffuse liver disease. This paper presents a Wold decomposition of the radio frequency (RF) field into its diffused and coherent components from which maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) or minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimates of the scattering spacing is easily computed