Abstract. The H-scan analysis of ultrasound images is a matched-filter approach derived from analysis of scattering from incident pulses in the form of Gaussian-weighted Hermite polynomial functions. This framework is applied in a preliminary study of thyroid lesions to examine the H-scan outputs for three categories: normal thyroid, benign lesions, and cancerous lesions within a total group size of 46 patients. In addition, phantoms comprised of spherical scatterers are analyzed to establish independent reference values for comparison. The results demonstrate a small but significant difference in some measures of the H-scan channel outputs between the different groups.
Spectral-based quantitative ultrasound (QUS) characterizations may provide a potential alternative to invasive gold standard technique—fine-needle aspiration (FNA)—in the diagnostic management of the thyroid cancer. Such potentiality was previously demonstrated in mouse thyroid cancer models ex vivo. Recently, the feasibility of the backscatter coefficient (BSC) estimation of human thyroid in vivo was demonstrated for a controlled group of 20 healthy volunteers (24.4 ± 2.9 year-old). Among the volunteer, the integrated BSC parameter was found equal to 1.41x10-2sr-1.cm-1 in the 3 to 9 MHz range. The current study focuses on the estimation of the BSC in a clinical context. Preliminary results on patients having malignant lesions are proposed. A research ultrasound imaging system (SonixTouch with an L14-5/38 linear array, Ultrasonix Medical Corp.) was employed by the radiologists of an oncological center first to record radio frequency data of the lesion and second to guide the FNA. The reference phantom technique was used in the same fashion as for the previous healthy volunteer’s study. The experimental protocol was approved by an Institutional Review Board, and all enrolled patients provided written informed consent. A controlled group of seven patients with a diagnosed papillary or follicular carcinomas were included in this pilot study to assess the ability of the technique to estimate the BSC and derived parameters in the lesions.
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