TY - JOUR
T1 - A Method for Stereological Determination of the Structure Function from Histological Sections of Isotropic Scattering Media
AU - Han, Aiguo
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 30, 2018; accepted March 18, 2018. Date of publication March 21, 2018; date of current version June 1, 2018. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grant R37EB002641 and Grant R01DK106419.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1986-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2018/6
Y1 - 2018/6
N2 - The frequency-dependent ultrasonic backscatter coefficient (BSC) from tissues, a fundamental parameter estimated by quantitative ultrasound (QUS) techniques, contains microstructure information useful for tissue characterization. To extract the microstructure information from the BSC, the tissue under investigation is often modeled as a collection of discrete scatterers embedded in a homogeneous background. From a discrete scatterer point of view, the BSC is dependent on not only the properties of individual scatterers relative to the background but also the scatterer spatial arrangement [described by the structure function (SF)]. Recently, the 2-D SF was computed from histological tissue sections, and was shown to be related to the volumetric SF extracted from QUS measurements. In this paper, a stereological method is proposed to extract the volumetric (3-D) SF from 2-D histological tissue sections. Simulations and experimental cell pellet biophantom studies were conducted to evaluate the proposed method. Simulation results verified the proposed method. Experimental results showed that the volumetric SF extracted using the proposed method had a significantly better agreement with the QUS-extracted SF than did the 2-D SF extracted in the previous study. The proposed stereological approach provides a useful tool for predicting the SF from histology.
AB - The frequency-dependent ultrasonic backscatter coefficient (BSC) from tissues, a fundamental parameter estimated by quantitative ultrasound (QUS) techniques, contains microstructure information useful for tissue characterization. To extract the microstructure information from the BSC, the tissue under investigation is often modeled as a collection of discrete scatterers embedded in a homogeneous background. From a discrete scatterer point of view, the BSC is dependent on not only the properties of individual scatterers relative to the background but also the scatterer spatial arrangement [described by the structure function (SF)]. Recently, the 2-D SF was computed from histological tissue sections, and was shown to be related to the volumetric SF extracted from QUS measurements. In this paper, a stereological method is proposed to extract the volumetric (3-D) SF from 2-D histological tissue sections. Simulations and experimental cell pellet biophantom studies were conducted to evaluate the proposed method. Simulation results verified the proposed method. Experimental results showed that the volumetric SF extracted using the proposed method had a significantly better agreement with the QUS-extracted SF than did the 2-D SF extracted in the previous study. The proposed stereological approach provides a useful tool for predicting the SF from histology.
KW - Acoustic scattering
KW - backscatter coefficient (BSC)
KW - stereology
KW - structure function (SF)
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U2 - 10.1109/TUFFC.2018.2818071
DO - 10.1109/TUFFC.2018.2818071
M3 - Article
C2 - 29856718
AN - SCOPUS:85044312641
SN - 0885-3010
VL - 65
SP - 1007
EP - 1016
JO - IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
JF - IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
IS - 6
ER -