Soft Tissue Characterization with Temporal Enhanced Ultrasound through Periodic Manipulation of Point Spread Function: A Feasibility Study

Temporal enhanced ultrasound (TeUS) is a tissue characterization approach based on analysis of a temporal series of US data. Previously we demonstrated that intrinsic or external micro-motions of scatterers in the tissue contribute towards the tissue classification properties of TeUS. This property is beneficial to detect early stage cancer, for example, where changes in nuclei configuration (scatteres) dominate tissue properties. In this study, we propose an analytical derivation and experiments to acquire TeUS through manipulation of US imaging parameters, which may be simpler to translate to clinical applications. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated on tissue-mimicking phantoms. Using an autoencoder classifier, we are able to classify phantoms of varying elasticities and scattering sizes.