I. Introduction
Phantoms with tissue mimicking material (TMM) are widely used to test and validate general ultrasound (US) imaging systems. They have added significance in quantitative ultrasound (QUS) applications, where they are used as references in removing the diffraction effects of the transducer array [1]. This reference phantom technique demands accurate calibration of phantom acoustic properties such as attenuation coefficient (AC), backscatter coefficient (BSC) and sound speed. Typically, the phantoms are lined with protective thin membranes on their external surface that complicate this calibration. Specifically, the transmission loss due to the membrane is nonnegligible and can introduce errors in the through-transmission phantom AC measurement if the transmission loss is not properly compensated for. The existing through-transmission methods [2] [3] compensate the membrane transmission loss by characterizing acoustic parameters of separate membrane and phantom material samples. However, this additional step complicates the calibration process since separate membrane and phantom material samples are not always freely available. Therefore, a new and simpler method is proposed that simultaneously estimates membrane transmission coefficient and phantom AC using a single phantom. Additionally, the paper validates the proposed method with respect to the existing method through phantom experiments.