Ultrasound normalized cumulative residual entropy imaging: Theory, methodology, and application

Ultrasound information entropy imaging is an emerging quantitative ultrasound technique for characterizing local tissue scatterer concentrations and arrangements. However, the commonly used ultrasound Shannon entropy imaging based on histogram-derived discrete probability estimation suffers from the drawbacks of histogram settings dependence and unknown estimator performance. In this paper, we introduced the information-theoretic cumulative residual entropy (CRE) defined in a continuous distribution of cumulative distribution functions as a new entropy measure of ultrasound backscatter envelope uncertainty or complexity, and proposed ultrasound CRE imaging for tissue characterization.