Ultrasound speckle and equivalent scatterers

B-mode ultrasound images are characterised by the speckle artefact, which introduces fine-false structures whose apparent resolution is beyond the imaging system capabilities. Speckle presence is due to interference effects between overlapping echoes and its occurrence is related to a great number of randomly distributed structure scatterers within a resolution cell. Basing our analysis on linear system theory, we show that a dense random set of scatterers can be substituted by an equivalent one with a much smaller number of periodic scatterers. This new structure with regularly distributed scatterers is able to give rise to the same B-mode image and the same speckle pattern, for a given ultrasound pulse. This new approach helps the understanding of the deterministic nature of speckle and may reduce drastically the computing time in numerical simulations. Additionally, it can contribute to periodicity analysis used in tissue characterisation. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.