The statistics of ultrasound echo envelope signals can be used to characterize scattering media. The Rayleigh distribution and its generalized forms, the K and Rice distributions, have been previously used to model the echo signal. A more generalized statistical model, the homodyned K distribution, combines the K and Rice distribution features to better account for the statistics of the echo signal. We show that this model can give two parameters that are useful for media characterization: k, the ratio of coherent to diffuse signals, and, β, which characterizes the clustering of scatterers in the medium.
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