Evidence for trapped surface bubbles as the cause for the twinkling artifact in ultrasound imaging.

Autor: Lu W; Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound, Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA., Sapozhnikov OA, Bailey MR, Kaczkowski PJ, Crum LA
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Ultrasound in medicine & biology [Ultrasound Med Biol] 2013 Jun; Vol. 39 (6), pp. 1026-38. Date of Electronic Publication: 2013 Apr 03.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2013.01.011
Abstrakt: The mechanism of the twinkling artifact (TA) that occurs during Doppler ultrasound imaging of kidney stones was investigated. The TA expresses itself in Doppler images as time-varying color. To define the TA quantitatively, beam-forming and Doppler processing were performed on raw per channel radio-frequency data collected when imaging human kidney stones in vitro. Suppression of twinkling by an ensemble of computer-generated replicas of a single radio frequency signal demonstrated that the TA arises from variability among the acoustic signals and not from electronic signal capture or processing. This variability was found to be random, and its suppression by elevated static pressure and return when the pressure was released suggest that the presence of bubbles on the stone surface is the mechanism that gives rise to the TA.
(Published by Elsevier Inc.)
Databáze: MEDLINE