Measurement method for sound speed and attenuation of blood vessel tissue using acoustic microscope with a high-frequency range probe

Abstract Acoustic microscopy can noninvasively measure acoustic properties, such as sound speed, density, and the attenuation coefficient of tissue sections or cells. The speed of sound can be estimated using a pulse-spectrum method; however, it may not be calculated accurately for samples with high attenuation. Moreover, a method for calculating the attenuation coefficient was proposed by Rohrbach et al., but the estimation error was large. Therefore, we propose a method for calculating the sound speed of a sample with high attenuation more accurately by correcting for the attenuation effect and attenuation coefficient. To achieve this, the acoustic impedance of the sample is estimated in advance. Numerical calculations of the normalized and interference spectra based on the results of both the conventional and proposed methods were performed to validate the proposed method.