Spectral analysis of backscattered ultrasound field from hydroxyapatite granules

Microcalcifications (MCs) are of great importance in breast cancer early diagnosis and sometimes they do represent the unique evidence of cancer disease (up to 47%). Their visualization in ultrasound (US) is limited by a number of factors the most important of which are speckle and system limited spatial resolution. MCs are modelled as hydroxyapatite (HA) microgranules and sound scattering from HA microgranules can be solved by mean of Faran model. Agar based phantoms have been manufactured to simulate human soft tissues with cylindrical shape and a commercial echo-scanner (Technos Mpx di ESAOTE s.r.l., Genova, Italia) has been used to perform the scan of the phantom. This work concerns with phantoms and the analysis of US data for the visualization of HA microgranules under multiple angle scan. A reconstruction method was hence used to get a 2D map of reflectivity from the target and further Fourier analysis was applied to radio frequency (RF) data.