Pulse-Echo Ultrasound Computed Tomography of Frequency-Dependent Acoustic Attenuation

Ultrasound attenuation (UA) shows clinical potential as a quantitative diagnostic biomarker and is an important component of ultrasound image equalization. Most of current UA estimation methods operate of beamformed data. This leads to biases in estimation and limited resolution. Particularly, wrong assumptions on the Speed-of-sound (SoS) can lead to large biases in UA. On the other hand, simultaneous estimations of SoS and UA can be beneficial for multi-parametric models. In this work, we propose a novel ultrasound computed tomography approach for UA estimation based on directly analysis of full-synthetic aperture data (FSA). This approach avoids the influence of beamforming and SoS in average Ultrasound Attenuation (UA) estimation and provide co-registered SoS and UA estimates from a single measurement. The method is build into a spectroscopy approach to reconstruct UA for arbitrary frequency-dependent attenuation properties.