The ultrasonic attenuation and backscatter coefficients of tissues are relevant acoustic parameters due to their wide range of clinical applications. In this paper, a linear least-squares method for the estimation of these coefficients in a homogeneous region of interest based on pulse-echo measurements is proposed. The method efficiently fits an ultrasound backscattered signal model to the measurements in both the frequency and depth dimension simultaneously at a low computational cost. It is demonstrated that the inclusion of depth information has a positive effect particularly on the accuracy of the estimated attenuation. The sensitivity of the attenuation and backscatter coefficients’ estimates to several predefined parameters such as the window length, window overlap and usable bandwidth of the spectrum is also studied. Comparison of the proposed method with a benchmark approach based on dynamic programming highlights better performance of our method in estimating these coefficients, both in terms of accuracy and computation time. Further analysis of the computation time as a function of the predefined parameters indicates our method’s potential to be used in real-time clinical settings.

由于其广泛的临床应用，组织的超声衰减和后向散射系数是相关的声学参数。在本文中，提出了一种基于脉冲回波测量的线性最小二乘法，用于估计均匀感兴趣区域中的这些系数。该方法以较低的计算成本同时有效地将超声反向散射信号模型拟合到频率和深度维度的测量结果。事实证明，包含深度信息具有积极影响，特别是对于估计衰减的准确性。还研究了衰减和反向散射系数估计对几个预定义参数（例如窗口长度、窗口重叠和频谱可用带宽）的敏感性。将所提出的方法与基于动态规划的基准方法进行比较，突显了我们的方法在估计这些系数方面的更好性能，无论是在准确性还是计算时间方面。对计算时间作为预定义参数函数的进一步分析表明我们的方法有可能用于实时临床环境。