Patent ID: 7914451

Claim:
Apparatus for determining one or more attributes of an animal tissue using acoustic energy, the apparatus comprising: an acoustic receiver module that receives acoustic energy that has been reflected from the animal tissue, and outputs an electrical signal based on the received acoustic energy; a display component; a user interface; a processor that is configured to process the signal to generate one or more sets of values of each of the one or more attributes of said animal tissue, said processor configured to: determine one or more characteristics of the acoustic energy, the one or more characteristics selected from the group consisting of: an amplitude-variations-with-offset characteristic, a signal trace characteristic, a spatial characteristic, and a spectral decomposition characteristic; generate the sets of the attribute values based on the one or more characteristics; associate each of the attribute values with one or more voxels in a region of interest in said animal tissue; display on the display component a representation of data points corresponding to at least one of the sets of attribute values the data points displayed at locations determined by the corresponding attribute values; receive by way of the user interface input selecting a subset of the data points; and perform subsequent analysis on a subset of the voxels corresponding to attribute values corresponding to the subset of the data points; and a computer storage configured to store the values of the one or more attributes of the animal tissue.