title: A generalized gamma mixture model for ultrasonic tissue characterization.
abstract: Several statistical models have been proposed in the literature to describe the behavior of speckles. Among them, the Nakagami distribution has proven to very accurately characterize the speckle behavior in tissues. However, it fails when describing the heavier tails caused by the impulsive response of a speckle. The Generalized Gamma (GG) distribution (which also generalizes the Nakagami distribution) was proposed to overcome these limitations. Despite the advantages of the distribution in terms of goodness of fitting, its main drawback is the lack of a closed-form maximum likelihood (ML) estimates. Thus, the calculation of its parameters becomes difficult and not attractive. In this work, we propose (1) a simple but robust methodology to estimate the ML parameters of GG distributions and (2) a Generalized Gama Mixture Model (GGMM). These mixture models are of great value in ultrasound imaging when the received signal is characterized by a different nature of tissues. We show that a better speckle characterization is achieved when using GG and GGMM rather than other state-of-the-art distributions and mixture models. Results showed the better performance of the GG distribution in characterizing the speckle of blood and myocardial tissue in ultrasonic images.
authors: Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen, ETSI Telecomunicación Edificio de las Nuevas Tecnologías, Campus Miguel Delibes s/n, Universidad de Valladolid, 47011 Valladolid, Spain. gvegsan@lpi.tel.uva.es
authors: Gonzalo
authors: G
authors: Vegas-Sanchez-Ferrero
authors: Santiago
authors: S
authors: Aja-Fernandez
authors: Cesar
authors: C
authors: Palencia
authors: Marcos
authors: M
authors: Martin-Fernandez
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D015233:Models, Statistical; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D016008:Statistical Distributions; D014463:Ultrasonography / Q000379:methods*