Performance of ultrasound echo decomposition using singular spectrum analysis

Diagnostic ultrasonography has its well-established role in medicine. Nevertheless, the quantitative characterisation of biological tissues by ultrasound (US) is still a main topic of research. Several parameters have been explored with this purpose, (e.g. attenuation, backscatter coefficient, US speed). More recently, mean scatterer space (MSS) has been proposed as a characterisation parameter. The objective of this work was to investigate the potential of the singular spectrum analysis (SSA) to estimate MSS. This method proposes the reconstruction of the periodic part of the original US signal from where the MSS of the medium can be estimated. SSA is applied to simulated and real backscattered echoes from a phantom and a bovine liver sample. Consistent results were obtained from both Monte-Carlo simulation and real data. They were compared with literature. Presently, precision, accuracy and sensibility of SSA are being investigated.