On Multifractal Tissue Characterization in Ultrasound Imaging

Tissue characterization based on ultrasound (US) images is an extensively explored research field. Most of the existing techniques are focused on the estimation of statistical or acoustic parameters from the backscattered radio-frequency signals, thus complementing the visual inspection of the conventional B-mode images. Additionally, a few studies show the interest of analyzing the fractal or multifractal behavior of human tissues, in particular of tumors. While biological experiments sustain such multifractal behaviors, the observations on US images are rather empirical. To our knowledge, there is no theoretical or practical study relating the fractal or multifractal parameters extracted from US images to those of the imaged tissues. The aim of this paper is to investigate how multifractal properties of a tissue correlate with the ones estimated from a simulated US image for the same tissue. To this end, an original simulation pipeline of multifractal tissues and their corresponding US images is proposed. Simulation results are compared to those in an in vivo experiment.