Total attenuation compensation for backscatter coefficient estimation using full angular spatial compounding in physical phantoms

The backscatter coefficient (BSC) quantifies the frequency-dependent reflectivity of tissues. Accurate estimation of the BSC requires knowledge of the attenuation coefficient slope (ACS) of tissues in the beam path between the transducer and the insonified region of interest, namely, the total attenuation. In this study, the total attenuation is calculated as the cumulative sum of values of a local attenuation map devised using full angular spatial compounding (FASC). The BSC was parameterized through the integrated backscatter coefficient (iBSC) obtaining iBSC maps. Experimental validation of the proposed approach consisted of scanning two cylindrical physical phantoms with off-centered inclusions having different ACS and BSC values than the background. Additional iBSC maps were computed assuming an uniform ACS map of 0.5 dB/cm/MHz (which is a value assumed for soft tissues) instead of the FASC-ACS map. Finally a iBSC map was obtained using an ideal ACS map formed with ground truth ACS values and knowledge of inclusion true position. The results were comparable when using the FASC-ACS map or the ideal ACS map in term of inclusion detectability and estimation accuracy. The use of the uniform ACS map resulted in some cases with very high fractional error (>9 dB), which highlights the relevance of accurate compensation for total attenuation. These results suggest that BSCs can be reliably estimated using total attenuation compensation from FASC-ACS maps.