Abstract Objectives To introduce ICEEMDAN–PC, a novel quantitative ultrasound (QUS) approach for accurate and noise-robust estimation of mean scatterer spacing (MSS), enabling refined characterization of liver and breast tissue microstructures in health, disease, and post-treatment states. Methods ICEEMDAN–PC integrates the improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN) and power cepstrum (PC). The intrinsic mode function with the highest energy is extracted, and its cepstrum is analyzed to determine MSS. The method was validated using 30,100 simulated noisy RF signals (semi-periodic/diffuse scatterers) and applied to: (1) 301 ex vivo porcine liver signals, (2) 31,488 paired RF signals pre/post microwave ablation (MWA), and (3) RF data from 100 clinical breast lesions (52 malignant, 48 benign). Results Simulations recovered the theoretical MSS (1.25 mm) with low variance despite high noise. In a healthy liver, MSS was 1.02 mm, with significant shifts post-MWA indicating microstructural disruption. Breast lesion MSS values (0.8736 mm benign, 0.9068 mm malignant) matched literature trends. Conclusions ICEEMDAN–PC consistently achieved high accuracy and sensitivity across simulated, experimental, and clinical datasets, demonstrating strong potential for non-invasive QUS-based tissue characterization and therapeutic monitoring.
Bahi et al. (Tue,) studied this question.