Single shot pulse-echo based attenuation coefficient estimation for ultrasound contrast agents

Ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs) consist of coated microbubbles with relevance in diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Understanding their oscillatory behavior in an acoustic field requires the knowledge of their shell parameters. One way to estimate these parameters is to fit a theoretical attenuation curve to the experimentally measured attenuation data. The latter, however, requires an additional reference measurement in the absence of UCAs, which may not always be feasible, for instance, for in-vivo applications. In view of this, we propose a new technique to estimate the UCA's attenuation coefficient directly from the ultrasound pulse-echo measurements in the target UCA medium. Our proposed approach does not rely on any reference measurement and can provide the attenuation estimates in a single-shot, benefitting from a least-squares based solver. Performance assessment on simulated data indicated its potential for accurate and fast attenuation estimation of UCAs in clinical settings.