Patent ID: 8092387

Claim:
An ultrasonic imaging technique for differentiating the distribution of scatterers within a tissue by utilizing Nakagami parameter m, comprising a correcting and an imaging procedure, wherein the correcting procedure comprises steps of: a. obtaining ultrasonic backscattered signals from a standard phantom in which a large amount of scatterers are randomly distributed and have a same size and acoustic impedance; b. compensating for the effect of attenuation, divergence, and noise for each signal; c. demodulating each signal to form an envelope image of the phantom; d. calculating the parameter m of each envelope in the envelope image and the mean value m ; e. selecting a window whose length and width are respectively equal to the pulselength, moving the window a pixel at a time across the envelope image from its left-top which is the beginning site calculating the value of the parameter m w whenever the window is moved to a new location until the window is completely through the envelope image; and calculating the mean value m w ; and f. determining whether the value m w is equal to the mean value m , if not, then increasing the length and width of the window and repeating the step e, and if m w = m , the window has its optimal size; and the imaging procedure comprises steps of: g. obtaining ultrasonic backscattered signals from a biological tissue; h. compensating for the effect of attenuation, divergence, and noise for each signal; i. demodulating each signal to form an envelope image of the biological tissue; j. forming a parameter m matrix corresponding to the biological tissue by utilizing the window of optimal size obtained in step f to calculate the value m w of each location of the envelope image; and k. generating an image that displays the parameter m matrix in step j by utilizing pseudocolors.