Quantitative Ultrasound in Complex and Highly Scattering Tissues (Marie Muller, North Carolina State Univ., USA)

My research aims to enhance the specificity of ultrasound by developing quantitative ultrasound (QUS) methods that extract meaningful physical parameters from backscattered wavefields, enabling functional assessment of highly heterogeneous tissue such as tumors, lung or bone. Across a range of tissues, we combine full synthetic aperture acquisitions and scattering theory to probe tissue organization, vascular structure, and porosity. First, we investigate scattering properties of the signals backscattered from microbubbles injected in tumor-related angiogenesis. (...) Next, we explore diffusion-based metrics for characterizing complex lung-mimicking media through aberrating layers. (...) Finally, we evaluate scattering- and entropy-based methods for detecting nodules within highly aerated lung-like media. (...) Together, these studies lay the foundation for a quantitative framework capable of characterizing complex tissues, with applications spanning oncology, lung monitoring and intraoperative guidance.