Local propagation speed constrained estimation of the slowness vector from non-planar array observations.

The estimation of the slowness vector of infrasound waves propagating across an array is a critical process leading to the determination of parameters of interest such as the direction of arrival. The sensors of an array are often considered to be located in a horizontal plane. However, due to topography, the altitudes of the sensors are not identical and introduce a bias on the estimate if neglected. However, the unbiased 3D estimation procedure, while suppressing the bias, leads to an increase of the variance. Accounting for an a priori constraint on the slowness vector significantly reduces the variance and could therefore improve the performance of the estimation if the introduced bias by incorrect a priori information remains negligible. This study focuses on measuring the benefits of this approach with a thorough investigation of the bias and variance of the constrained 3D estimator, which is not available in the existing literature. This contribution provides such computations based on an asymptotic Gaussian approximation. Simulations are carried out to assess the theoretical results both with synthetic and real data. Thus, a constrained 3D estimator is proposed yielding the best bias/variance compromise if good knowledge of the propagation wave speed is accessible.

Maximum likelihood estimation of shear wave speed in transient elastography.

Ultrasonic transient elastography (TE), enables to assess, under active mechanical constraints, the elasticity of the liver, which correlates with hepatic fibrosis stages. This technique is routinely used in clinical practice to assess noninvasively liver stiffness. The Fibroscan system used in this work generates a shear wave via an impulse stress applied on the surface of the skin and records a temporal series of radio-frequency (RF) lines using a single-element ultrasound probe. A shear wave propagation map (SWPM) is generated as a 2-D map of the displacements along depth and time, derived from the correlations of the sequential 1-D RF lines, assuming that the direction of propagation (DOP) of the shear wave coincides with the ultrasound beam axis (UBA). Under the assumption of pure elastic tissue, elasticity is proportional to the shear wave speed. This paper introduces a novel approach to the processing of the SWPM, deriving the maximum likelihood estimate of the shear wave speed when comparing the observed displacements and the estimates provided by the Green's functions. A simple parametric model is used to interface Green's theoretical values of noisy measures provided by the SWPM, taking into account depth-varying attenuation and time-delay. The proposed method was evaluated on numerical simulations using a finite element method simulator and on physical phantoms. Evaluation on this test database reported very high agreements of shear wave speed measures when DOP and UBA coincide.

Evaluation of in vivo liver tissue characterization with spectral RF analysis versus elasticity.

Ultrasonic elastography, via vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTE), enables to assess, under active mechanical constraints, the elasticity of the liver, correlating with fibrosis stages. On the other hand, the same VCTE probe can also be used in passive mode, acquiring RF lines at different locations in the liver. This paper presents a thorough evaluation of passive-mode RF spectral parameters (integrated backscatter coefficient, power spectral index, effective scattering size and spectral variance), for tissue characterization on a large cohort of volunteers with various ranges of elasticity measures. Results showed that capabilities to discriminate between liver and subcutaneous fat tissues were highly variable among spectral parameters. Furthermore, it appears that no in vivo discrimination of liver elasticity/fibrosis stage can be performed with passive RF spectral analysis, at 3.5MHz.

Measurement of the skin-liver capsule distance on ultrasound RF data for 1D transient elastography.

Vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTETM) technique is routinely used in clinical practice to assess non-invasively the liver stiffness which is correlated to hepatic fibrosis. Adequate use of the VCTETM probe requires the knowledge of the distance between the skin and the liver parenchyma. This paper compares two methods to estimate this distance using spatial variations of the spectral content of ultrasound radiofrequency (RF) lines, obtained from a probe consisting of a single element ultrasound transducer placed in front of the liver right lobe. Results on a database of 188 patients, including normal-weight and obese persons, show that the spectral variance can accurately discriminate the subcutaneous fat from the liver tissue. The proposed algorithm works in real-time and is suitable for VCTETM scanning protocol setup.

Autoregressive-model-based missing value estimation for DNA microarray time series data.

Missing value estimation is important in DNA microarray data analysis. A number of algorithms have been developed to solve this problem, but they have several limitations. Most existing algorithms are not able to deal with the situation where a particular time point (column) of the data is missing entirely. In this paper, we present an autoregressive-model-based missing value estimation method (ARLSimpute) that takes into account the dynamic property of microarray temporal data and the local similarity structures in the data. ARLSimpute is especially effective for the situation where a particular time point contains many missing values or where the entire time point is missing. Experiment results suggest that our proposed algorithm is an accurate missing value estimator in comparison with other imputation methods on simulated as well as real microarray time series datasets.