Statistical properties of radio-frequency and envelope-detected signals with applications to medical ultrasound

Both radio-frequency (rf) and envelope-detected signal analyses have lead to successful tissue discrimination in medical ultrasound. The extrapolation from tissue discrimination to a description of the tissue structure requires an analysis of the statistics of complex signals. To that end, first- and second-order statistics of complex random signals are reviewed, and an example is taken from rf signal analysis of the backscattered echoes from diffuse scatterers. In this case the scattering form factor of small scatterers can be easily separated from long-range structure and corrected for the transducer characteristics, thereby yielding an instrument-independent tissue signature. The statistics of the more economical envelope- and square-law-detected signals are derived next and found to be almost identical when normalized autocorrelation functions are used. Of the two nonlinear methods of detection, the square-law or intensity scheme gives rise to statistics that are more transparent to physical insight. Moreover, an analysis of the intensity-correlation structure indicates that the contributions to the total echo signal from the diffuse scatter and from the steady and variable components of coherent scatter can still be separated and used for tissue characterization. However, this analysis is not system independent. Finally, the statistical methods of this paper may be applied directly to envelope signals in nuclear-magnetic-resonance imaging because of the approximate equivalence of second-order statistics for magnitude and intensity.