BACKGROUND Remodeling of myocardial tissue after infarction may culminate in the development of either a well-healed scar or a thin, expanded heart wall segment that predisposes to ventricular aneurysm formation, congestive heart failure, or ventricular tachycardia. The three-dimensional architecture of mature human infarct tissue and the mechanisms that determine it have not been elucidated. W...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the frequency dependence of ultrasonic backscatter for its ability to differentiate between neoplastic and healthy tissue. METHODS Standard B-mode images were created of 5 rats with spontaneous mammary tumors, and regions of interest in the lesion and surrounding tissue were parameterized by the slope of the backscatter amplitude versus frequency. RESULTS In 4 of the 5...

The aim of ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation includes the detection and characterization of defects, and an understanding of the nature of defects is essential for the assessment of structural integrity in safety critical systems. In general, the defect characterization challenge involves an estimation of defect parameters from measured data. In this paper, we explore the extent to which de...

Intensity variations in image texture can provide powerful quantitative information about physical properties of biological tissue. However, tissue patterns can vary according to the utilized imaging system and are intrinsically correlated to the scale of analysis. In the case of ultrasound, the Nakagami distribution is a general model of the ultrasonic backscattering envelope under various sca...

Microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography was explored to image biological tissue. Short microwave pulses irradiated tissue to generate acoustic waves by thermoelastic expansion. The microwave-induced thermoacoustic waves were detected with a focused ultrasonic transducer. Each time-domain signal from the ultrasonic transducer represented a one-dimensional image along the acoustic axis of the...

A frequency-swept ultrasonic beam was focused into a biological tissue sample to modulate the laser light passing through the ultrasonic beam inside the tissue. Parallel detection of the speckle field formed by the transmitted laser light was implemented with the source-synchronous-illumination lock-in technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The ultrasound-modulated laser light reflects...

Ultrasonic tissue characterization has shown promise for clinical diagnosis of diseased bone (e.g., osteoporosis) by establishing correlations between bone ultrasonic characteristics and the state of disease. Porous (trabecular) bone supports propagation of two compressional modes, a fast wave and a slow wave, each of which is characterized by an approximately linear-withfrequency attenuation c...