Experimental investigation of the acoustic nonlinearity parameter tomography for excised pathological biological tissues

The acoustic nonlinearity parameter B/A tomography is proposed as a novel i maging method in this paper. By using this method, the B/A tomography for v arious kinds of normal and pathological porcine tissues in vitro, including eight kinds of diseased livers, four kinds of diseased kidney and one kind of diseased spleen, are studied. Results indicate that all diseased tissue s with changes in tissue composition and structural features exhibit higher grey-scale (higher B/A values) than corresponding normal tissues. In addit ion, the acoustic nonlinearity parameter is more sensitive to pathological states than acoustic linear parameters. To make a comparison with the acous tic nonlinearity parameter tomography, the acoustic linear parameter images , including two B-scan images for two kinds of diseased specimens, are also presented. Results of this paper show that the acoustic nonlinearity param eter tomography may be a novel method for tissue characterization in ultras onic medical diagnosis. (C) 1999 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicin e & Biology.