Ultrasound scatter-spacing based diagnosis of focal diseases of the liver

Ultrasound returns from liver shows periodicity arising from periodic scattering centers within tissue. Focal diseases such as tumors interrupt this structure. In this paper, we propose the use of a wavelet transform based technique to estimate the inter-scatterer-distribution (ISS) in diagnosing focal diaseases of the liver. The efficacy of the method is illustrated with simulated and clinical ultrasound images. The mean value (MSS) of the ISS has been proposed as a signature for focal diseases, but its effectiveness has not been established yet. We show that the ISS distribution may function as a feature to characterize focal diseases even when its mean value MSS fails. The method proposed in this paper works even when data is non-stationary.