An improved acoustic clutter model and direct in vivo assessment of off-axis and multipath clutter energy in the liver

The role of multipath and off-axis scattering induced clutter has recently received renewed attention. In order to address these clutter sources and preserve the ultrasound channel data, we proposed a model based approach. The original model had some shortcomings and did not preserve the expected speckle SNR. Here we present a new model and decomposition scheme that preserves the expected speckle statistics of B-mode images. The new speckle statistics are 1.90±0.057 compared to 1.32±0.047 for the old model. The recovery of speckle SNR also results in improvements in contrast-to-noise ratio compared to both normal B-mode and the previous method.