Ultrasound apparatus and method for tissue characterization

• US 6,264,609 B1
• Filed: 09/15/1999
• Issued: 07/24/2001
• Est. Priority Date: 09/15/1999
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Wake Forest University Health Sciences
• Original Assignee: Wake Forest University
• Inventors: Fan, Liexiang, Santago, Peter II, Herrington, David M.
• Primary Examiner(s): Vo, Peter
• Assistant Examiner(s): Imam, Ali M.
• Application Number:
  US09/396,153
• Time in Patent Office: 678 Days
• Field of Search: 600/437, 600/441-447, 600/449, 600/450, 73/625, 73/626, 367/7, 367/11, 367/130, 250/341.3
• US Class Current: 600/443
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 5/02007 Evaluating blood vessel condition, e.g. elasticity, compliance
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 8/0858 involving measuring tissue layers, e.g. skin, interfaces

Abstract

The present invention relates generally to a medical device, and more particularly to ultrasound apparatus and methods for the identification and characterization of tissues, tissue transitions and tissue constituent structures.

Claims

1. A method for tissue characterization in a region of interest in a body comprising the steps of:

establishing a physical model of pre-selected tissue that is used to simulate an ultrasound image formation process;

simulating an ultrasound image structure comprising the pre-selected tissue;

comparing the simulated data with scanned images of actual pre-selected tissue; and

distinguishing gradients in the feature space to identify transitions between different tissue types.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein said simulating an ultrasound image comprises the simulation of transmitting pulses of ultrasound energy into a body, receiving pulses of returned ultrasound energy for said region of interest in said body, digitizing said pulses of returned energy, and computing the power spectrum by performing a Fast Fourier Transform on said digitized pulses of returned energy;

and determining the Fourier energy in each of a plurality of selected Fourier frequency bands of the power spectrum of said digitized pulses.

3. A method for tissue characterization in a region of interest in a body comprising the steps of:

establishing a physical model of pre-selected tissue that is used to simulate an ultrasound image formation process;

simulating an ultrasound image structure comprising the pre-selected tissue;

comparing the simulated data with scanned images of actual pre-selected tissue; and

detecting tissue transitions using gradient based edge detection in a feature space where the substrate for the algorithm is a metric of randomness of the scatterers in the region of interest.

4. A method for tissue characterization in a region of interest in a body comprising the steps of:

gating digitized backscatter signals to form scan lines;

segmenting each scan line into a pre-determined number of segments;

analyzing the power spectrum of each segment;

forming a parametric image to produce a standard gain control (SGC) map;

applying a boundary detection algorithm to detect tissue boundaries by means of the SGC map; and

quantifying the tissue structure.

5. An apparatus for tissue characterization in a region of interest in a body comprising:

a gating device for digitized backscatter signals to form scan lines;

a segmenting device for segmenting each scan line into a pre-determined number of segments;

an analyzer for analyzing the power spectrum of each segment;

forming a parametric image to produce a standard gain control (SGC) map;

applying a boundary detection algorithm to detect tissue boundaries by means of the SGC map; and

quantifying the tissue structure.