Ultrasound characterization of aggregated red blood cells : towards in vivo application

Emilie Franceschini (1) , François T. H. Yu (1) , Guy Cloutier (1)

1 LBUM - Laboratory of Biorheology and Medical Ultrasonics

Ultrasonic backscattered signals from blood contain frequency-dependent information that can be used to obtain quantitative parameters reflecting the aggregation state of red blood cells (RBCs). The difficulty to use this frequency-dependent information in vivo is due to the attenuation caused by intervening tissue layers that distorts the spectral content of backscattering properties from blood microstructures. We propose an optimization method to simultaneously estimate tissue attenuation and blood structure factor. In an in vitro experiment, we obtained satisfactory estimates with relative errors below 25% for attenuations between 0.115 and 0.412 dB/cm/MHz and D<10 (D the aggregate diameter expressed in number of RBCs).

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Emilie Franceschini, François T. H. Yu, Guy Cloutier. Ultrasound characterization of aggregated red blood cells : towards in vivo application. Research Network GDR 2501, Jun 2008, France. pp.293-302. ⟨hal-00443787⟩