Estimation of acoustic impedance from multiple ultrasound images with application to spatial compounding

Abstract

Reflection of sound waves, due to acoustic impedance mismatch at the interface of two media, is the principal physical property which allows visualization with ultrasound. In this paper, we investigate reconstruction of the acoustic impedance from ultrasound images for the first time. Similar to spatial compounding, we combine multiple images to improve the estimation. We use phase information to determine regions of high reflection from an ultrasound image. We model the physical imaging process with an emphasis on the reflection of sound waves. The model is used in computing the acoustic impedance (up to a scale) from areas of high reflectivity. The acoustic impedance image can either be directly visualized or be used in simulation of ultrasound images from an arbitrary point of view. The experiments performed on in-vitro and in-vivo data show promising results.