Ultrasound scattering from cell-pellet biophantoms and ex vivo tumors provides insight into the cellular structure involved in scattering

International audience; The histologically identifiable cellular structure(s) involved in ultrasonic scattering is(are) yet to be uniquely identified. The study quantifies six possible cellular scattering parameters, namely, cell and nucleus radii and their respective cell and nucleus volume fractions as well as a combination of cell and nucleus radii and their volume fraction. The six cellular parameters are each derived from four cell lines (4T1, JC, LMTK, and MAT) and two tissue types (cell-pellet biophantom and ex vivo tumor). Optical histology and quantitative ultrasound (QUS), both independent approaches, are used to yield these cellular parameters. QUS scatterer parameters are experimentally determined using two ultrasonic scattering models: the spherical Gaussian model (GM) and the structure factor model (SFM) to yield insight about scattering from nuclei only and cells only. GM is a classical ultrasonic scattering model to evaluate QUS parameters and is well adapted for diluted media. SFM is adapted for dense media to estimate reasonably well scatterer parameters of cellular structures from ex vivo tissue. Nucleus and cell radii and volume fractions are measured optically from histology. They were used as inputs to calculate BSC for scattering from cells, nuclei, and both cells and nuclei. The QUS-derived scatterers (radii and volume fractions) distributions were then compared to the optical histology scatterer parameters derived from these calculated BSCs. The results suggest scattering from cells only (LMTK and MAT) or both cells and nuclei (4T1 and JC) for cell-pellet biophantoms and scattering from nuclei only for tumors.