Nahk. Rao et H. Zhu, SIMULATION STUDY OF CHANGES IN ULTRASOUND SPECKLE STATISTICS WITH THESYSTEM POINT-SPREAD FUNCTION, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 95(2), 1994, pp. 1161-1164
The intensity point signal-to-noise ratio, SNR(I), characterizing the
ultrasound speckle statistics, depends on the tissue scattering micros
tructure and the imaging systems point spread function. Both should be
described in three-dimensional space. Therefore, a three-dimensional
simulation model is used in this paper to generate a rf signal and stu
dy the variations in SNR(I) with the transducer center frequency and b
andwidth. Results are in agreement with existing theoretical predictio
ns. A possible method to analyze the SNR(I) data is also presented tha
t can produce a straight line slope as a feature value that depends on
the tissue scattering microstructure only. Such a feature may prove t
o be more useful than SNR(I) values in tissue characterization problem
s.