Systems, methods and devices for highly-parallelized qusvalue determination for characterizing a specimen

A method of real-time quantitative ultrasound (QUS) calculation across a region of a specimen, the specimen being subjected to ultrasound signals along one or more scan lines, the method comprising:

• associating RF signals generated from returned ultrasound signals from the specimen with respective locations along the one or more scan lines;
• providing to a parallelizable processing unit, in response to an initiating data request, a plurality of raw signal data, each of said raw signal data uniquely associated with the respective locations
• calculating, in parallel in said parallelizable processing unit, a plurality of QUS parameter values, each of said QUS parameter values associated with at least one of said raw signal data from a group of one or more adjacent respective locations along one or more of the one or more scan lines;
• and
• generating, in a communicatively coupled data storage medium, a data array of QUS parameter values, each of said QUS parameter values in said data array being indicative of a characteristic of the specimen at the at least one location associated with the returned ultrasound RF signals used to calculate that QUS parameter value.

A parallelizable processing device for simultaneously calculating a plurality of quantitative ultrasound (QUS) values representative of a region of a specimen, said parallelizable processing unit configured to receive a plurality of RF signals collected from an ultrasound analysis of said region, each RF signal associated with respective axial scan lines in said specimen representative of a characteristic of the specimen at each of multiple locations within the specimen along each of said axial scan lines, said parallelizable processing device comprising:

• a data bus configured to accept a plurality of data values associated with said RF signals, each respective data value relating to a given RF signal based on an ultrasound signal from a given location in said specimen;
• a data storage medium configured to store said plurality of data values and, upon a data request, provide at least some of said plurality of data values;
• and
• a parallel processing unit, said parallel processing unit comprising a plurality of processors, said processors for concurrently performing the same analysis function in parallel on each of said provided data values.