The luminal surface of the arterial wall roughens in the early-stage atherosclerosis. A possible differentiation between the reflected and scattered components in the ultrasonic echo from the arterial wall potentially can serve as a diagnostic tool when such roughening occurs. This study presents a method for the differentiation of reflection and scattering components by creating ultrasonic beams from different directions using the synthetic aperture method. The technique was evaluated in experiments on urethane rubber phantoms. The average magnitude of the echo signals from each phantom and the ratio of the mean values of the reflection and scattering components were found to be proportional to the arithmetic average roughness evaluated with a laser surface profilometer. These results show that the proposed separation technique has potentials in evaluation of surface roughness.

在早期动脉粥样硬化中，动脉壁的管腔表面变粗糙。当发生这种粗糙时，来自动脉壁的超声回波中反射和散射分量之间可能的区别可能用作诊断工具。本研究提出了一种通过使用合成孔径法从不同方向产生超声波束来区分反射和散射分量的方法。该技术在聚氨酯橡胶模型的实验中得到了评估。发现来自每个体模的回波信号的平均幅度以及反射和散射分量的平均值之比与用激光表面轮廓仪评估的算术平均粗糙度成正比。