A new method for estimating the acoustic attenuation coefficient of tissue from reflected ultrasonic signals

The parameter characterizing the acoustic attenuation in tissue is considered to be an indicator of the state of the tissue. On the basis of a model of the ultrasonic signals reflected from soft tissue, the authors propose a method for estimating the frequency slope of the attenuation coefficient from such signals. This method features an autoregressive deconvolution procedure, which removes the incident waveform and other information irrelevant to the attenuation from the reflected signal, and a spectral smoothing procedure, which minimizes the variance of spectral slope estimation. The results of simulation and of processing actual human liver data (in vivo) show that the standard deviation of the estimation is approximately halved by this method, compared to the traditional spectral difference method.<>