Cystic resolution and task performance in beamforming

Cystic resolution (CR) may be considered to be the contrast resolution in the center of a small anechoic "cyst". The goal of this work is to evaluate cystic resolution from the perspective of task performance in breast sonography. We demonstrate that CR is rigorously related to task performance for the particular task of detecting the presence of a cyst from a single sample at the center of the cyst. We compare this to other tasks relevant to breast imaging.