Patent Document ID: 4817015
Application ID: 06798930
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for classifying a region of interest (ROI) within a portion of a body using at least two statistical properties of ultrasound echoes from said ROI, and for forming an image of said portion of said body with said ROI, said statistical properties being related to physical scattering properties of said ROI, said method comprising creating said image by emitting at least one burst of ultrasound energy with a piezoelectric transducer into said body, including into said portion of said body and said ROI therein, and receiving with transducer means said ultrasound echoes from respective parts of said ROI and other ultrasound echoes from respective parts of the rest of said portion of said body, as acoustic reflections of each said at least one burst from respective parts within said portion of said body and said ROI, said transducer means outputting a plurality of electrical signals respectively corresponding to said acoustic reflections from said respective parts within said portion of said body, amplifying said electrical signals output from said transducer, and using the respective amplified electrical signals from each said burst to create said image, determining, for said classifying of said ROI with said using of said at least two statistical properties, at least two of: (a) a first order statistical parameter b indicating the square of the mean of intensities of all of said ultrasound echoes from said ROI for each respective burst, each said intensity being proportional to the square of the envelope of the respective ultrasound echo; (b) a first order statistical parameter t, wherein said parameter t is a variance in said intensities of said ultrasound echoes from said ROI plus a sum of a total average of said backscatter intensity in said ROI; (c) a second order statistical parameter d, wherein said parameter d is a measure of average spacing of any periodic and semi-periodic array of specular scatterers in said ROI, said statistical parameter d corresponding to an average spatial frequency location of non-redundant peaks of a noise power spectrum corresponding to the square of the absolute magnitude of a Fourier transformation of said intensities of said ultrasound echoes from said ROI; and (d) a second order statistical parameter p, said statistical parameter p being determined only in the event said statistical parameter b is determined as one of said at least two statistical parameters, wherein said statistical parameter p is the variance of said backscatter intensity due to said periodic and semi-periodic array in said ROI plus the sum of the total average of said backscatter intensity from said ROI, said statistical parameter p being formed by integration of a remainder of said noise power spectrum after subtraction of a Gaussian noise envelope term therefrom, and by then subtracting said statistical parameter b from the integrated remainder; and displaying at least two values, each corresponding to at least one respective one of said at least two statistics parameters; wherein said at least two displayed values allow said classifying based on physical characteristics of said ROI, including whether the material in said ROI in said body is in a normal or abnormal state.