The paper presents a classification of the healthy skin and the skin lesions (basal cell carcinoma) basing on a statistics of the envelope of ultrasonic echoes. The echoes envelopes distributions were modeled using Rayleigh and K-distribution. The distributions were compared with empirical data to find which of them better models the statistics of the echo-signal obtained from the human skin. The results indicated that the K-distribution provides a better fit.

Also, a characteristic parameter of the K-distribution, the effective number of scatterers (M), was investigated. The values of the M parameter, obtained for the skin cancer (basal cell carcinoma), were lower as compared to those obtained for the healthy skin. The results indicate that the statistical quantitative ultrasound parameters have a potential for extracting information useful for characterization of the skin condition.

This paper investigates the differential binary modulation for decode-and-forward (DF) based relay-assisted free space optical (FSO) network under the effect of strong atmospheric turbulence together with misalignment error (ME). The atmospheric fading links experience K-distributed turbulence. First we derive novel closed form expression for average bit error rate (BER) and outage probability (OP) in terms of Meijer’s G function. Further, the OP of differential DF-FSO system with multiple relays is derived. We also analyze the asymptotic performance for the sake of getting the order of diversity and the coding gain. The power allotment term is utilized to examine the effect of different power allotment techniques on BER and OP. The simulation results have been used to validate the derived analytical results.