RF Ultrasound Estimation from B-Mode Images

This chapter describes a method to estimate/recover the ultrasound RF envelope signal from the observed B-mode images by taking into account the main operations usually performed by the ultrasound scanner in the acquisition process.The proposed method assumes a Rayleigh distribution for the RF signal and a nonlinear logarithmic law, depending on unknown parameters, to model the compression procedure performed by the scanner used to improve the visualization of the data.The goal of the proposed method is to estimate the parameters of the compression law, depending on the specific brightness and contrast adjustments performed by the operator during the acquisition process, in order to revert the process.The method provides an accurate observation model which allows to design robust and effective despeckling ∕ reconstruction methods for morphological and textural analysis of Ultrasound data to be used in Computer Aided Dagnosis (CAD) applications.Numerous simulations with synthetic and real data, acquired under different conditions and from different tissues, show the robustness of the method and the validity of the adopted observation model to describe the acquisition process implemented in the conventional ultrasound scanners.

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