Development and Application of Three-dimensional Impedance Maps Related to Tissue Pathology
Three-dimensional acoustic tissue models are a unique means to study ultrasonic scattering by tissue microstructure. In this work, the previous methods used to create and analyze these models were evaluated and refined. These techniques were then applied to a set of 10 human fibroadenomas, a benign tumor of the breast. These models, called three-dimensional impedance maps (3DZMs), are created from serial sets of histological images which must be properly transformed to recreate the original tissue volume. A properly reconstructed 3DZM can then be used to estimate properties, such as the effective scatterer size, of the ultrasonic scattering sites in the underlying tissue. These estimates can, in turn, be related to histological features of the tissue. For the fibroadenoma datasets, the average effective scatterer diameter was estimated to be 84 ± 40 μm when the entire volume was used for analysis. This result compared roughly to the size of the acini in the tissue, although a wide variation was observed in the histological layout of the tissue.
Acoustic tissue models, Ultrasonic backscatter, Quantitative ultrasound, Acoustic form factors
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign