Roberto Lavarello - IEEE Xplore Author Profile

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Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) holds promise in enhancing diagnostic accuracy. For attenuation imaging, the regularized spectral log difference (RSLD) can generate accurate local attenuation maps. However, the performance of the method degrades when significant changes in backscatter amplitude occur. Variations in the technique were introduced involving a weighted approach to backscatter regulariza...Show More
Ultrasound beamformers play a critical role in medical imaging, and understanding their robustness under worst-case scenarios is essential for reliable performance. This study investigates the adversarial robustness of two beamformers that used deep neural networks (DNN) trained in an end-to-end fashion by producing B-mode reconstructions directly from raw ultrasound channel data. Results reveal c...Show More
Liver steatosis, a type of fatty liver disease, has been gaining significant attention in the medical field due to its global prevalence. Currently, large-scale evaluations of liver steatosis are hindered by the variability of the available non-invasive imaging tools. While conventional ultrasound often serves as the primary imaging modality for liver assessments, its accuracy is limited by its qu...Show More
The estimation of attenuation coefficient slope (ACS) using the Spectral Log Difference (SLD) technique has presented high variability, leading to the use of regularization approaches. To address this issue, a previous study proposed the isolated denoising of the spectral log ratios at each frequency (TVSLD). In this study, we present a multifrequency joint method (WTNV-SLD) that leverages spatial...Show More
The estimation of the nonlinearity parameter (B/A) has potential to be used in the diagnosis of conditions such as liver steatosis. Recently, a pulse-echo method to estimate B/A using: a dual-energy approach, one reference phantom, and the approximation of the 2nd harmonic in terms of envelopes of fundamental band of RF data was presented. However, the performance of this method degrades when the ...Show More
As the use of ultrasound beamformers based on deep neural networks (DNNs) continues to gain popularity, it becomes increasingly important to assess their robustness. Traditional model-based beamformers are typically evaluated by studying factors such as sound speed variations, off-axis clutter, and other variables that challenge the underlying model. However, these conventional evaluation methods ...Show More
Quantitative Ultrasound (QUS) is a non-invasive imaging modality that characterizes tissues numerically. A well-known QUS parameter is the attenuation coefficient slope (ACS). A previous work proposed a regularized spectral log difference method (RSLD) to estimate the ACS, yet the ACS and the backscatter component were computed as independent parameters using a single channel total variation with ...Show More
H-scan ultrasound (US) imaging is a high-resolution soft tissue characterization technique. It is a matched filter approach derived from analysis of scattering from incident pulses in the general form of nth-order Gaussian-weighted Hermite polynomial functions (GHn). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential of H-scan US imaging to distinguish scatterer distributions of biopsy-confir...Show More
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has become the most common cause of chronic liver disease worldwide. In addition, conducting large-scale screening studies is still challenging due to the absence of reliable and affordable noninvasive tools for NAFLD staging. Conventional ultrasound is commonly the preferred first imaging modality used to evaluate liver steatosis. However, it is mainly a q...Show More
The attenuation coefficient (AC) is parameter used in quantitative ultrasound that allows the characterization of different tissue types. The regularized spectral log difference (RSLD) method is a technique that uses a regularization step based on total variation in order to extend the trade-off between the estimation variance and spatial resolution. However, the RSLD method consider only piecewis...Show More
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the most prevalent chronic liver diseases. While early diagnosis is the most effective course of action, NAFLD diagnosis procedures are still limited since they are invasive and have a heavy component of subjectivity. In this paper, we present an approach based on Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to detect liver ste...Show More
High-frequency (center frequency of 18MHz) ultrasound was combined with crawling wave elastography to characterize skin viscoelastic properties in two anatomical sites (i.e., thigh and forearm) in humans in the range of 200–400 Hz. The Voigt model was used to obtain shear elasticity and shear viscosity estimates. The forearm’s mean shear elasticity and shear viscosity were 6 kPa and 5.5 Pa.s, resp...Show More
H-scan ultrasound (US) imaging is a new tissue classification approach that depicts the relative size of scattering objects. The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of in vivo H-scan US imaging to discriminate benign from malignant thyroid nodules in human subjects. Image data was acquired using a SonixTouch US scanner (Analogic Ultrasound) equipped with an L14-5 transducer. To generat...Show More
Kidney transplantation is the preferred long-term treatment modality for patients with end-stage renal disease as it confers improved survival and quality of life devoid of dialysis constraints. However, graft loss is still a concern in transplant recipients, necessitating close monitoring. The estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) is often used as a surrogate marker of kidney function. Many...Show More
Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) is a set of techniques for tissue characterization which allows to model tissue properties, such as ultrasonic attenuation and backscatter coefficients. Nevertheless, the challenge of QUS parameters estimation still remains as the trade-off between estimates variance and spatial resolution limits the applicability of the estimations. This work aims at providing an eff...Show More
Skin characterization is of importance for disease diagnosis and treatment follow-up. In particular, estimation of the biomechanical properties is useful for wound healing monitoring. This study proposes and validates for the first time the use of multi-wave quantitative ultrasound (MWQUS) as a skin characterization tool via the estimation of attenuation coefficient slope (ACS) and shear wave spee...Show More
Pulse Inversion (PI) is a transmission technique used for harmonic imaging. By transmitting two phase inverted signals, which allow cancelling out the fundamental component, PI is able to achieve better image quality thanks to the reduced clutter/reverberation and to the improved bandwidth of the second harmonic. Here, a technique based on Resolution Enhancement Compression (REC) that improves the...Show More
Few studies of in vivo normal human dermis characterization have been reported. In this study, the regularized spectral-log difference (RSLD) method was used for the estimation of the attenuation coefficient slope (ACS) in the forearm and thigh dermis with the objective of complementing previous studies on characterization of the forearm dermis and exploring the variations of ACS at different anat...Show More
Lymph nodes characterization plays an important role in cancer staging and detecting local or distant recurrences. Previous studies have demonstrated the usefulness of ultrasound backscatter coefficients (BSCs) at high frequencies (16.4 - 33.6 MHz) for detecting micro-metastasis of colorectal, gastric and breast cancers in lymph nodes. However, these studies were conducted ex vivo. In this work, t...Show More
Quantitative ultrasound parameters such as backscatter and attenuation coefficients can be used to characterize tissues along with B-mode image ultrasound. However, these coefficients must be accurately found, and can be hard to measure. Simultaneous estimation of both backscatter coefficient and the total attenuation reduces the necessity of rely on previous studies to accurate know the attenuati...Show More
Skin elastic properties change during a cutaneous disorder or in the aging process. Deep knowledge of skin layers helps monitoring and diagnosing structural changes. High frequency ultrasound (HF-US) has been recently introduced to diagnose and evaluate some dermatological disorders in the clinical practice. US elastography adds elasticity information of the analyzed tissue. In particular, harmoni...Show More
Recent studies suggest that Resolution Enhancement Compression (REC) can provide significant improvements in terms of imaging quality over Classical Pulsed (CP) ultrasonic imaging techniques, by employing frequency and amplitude modulated transmitted signals. However the performance of coded excitations methods degrades drastically deeper into the tissue where the attenuation effects become more s...Show More
Echographic imaging depicts anatomical structure by displaying the magnitude of the envelope-detected backscattered echoes. However, ultrasonic radiofrequency data contains a richer information content that can be exploited for constructing images of intrinsic tissue properties. In particular, spectral-based ultrasonic tissue characterization techniques allow imaging parameters such as the backsca...Show More
The axial resolution of an ultrasound imaging system is inversely proportional to the bandwidth of the emitted signal. When conventional pulsing (CP) is used, the impulse response of the transducer and the excitation signal determine together the shape of the emitted pulse and its bandwidth. A way to increase the ultrasound image resolution is to increase the transducer's limited passband. The res...Show More
The attenuation coefficient slope (ACS) has the potential to be used for tissue characterization and as a diagnostic ultrasound tool, hence complementing B-mode images. The ACS can be valuable for the estimation of other ultrasound parameters such as the backscatter coefficient. There is a well-known tradeoff between the precision of the estimated ACS values and the data block size used in the spe...Show More