3,965 research outputs found
Design of a sparse planar array for optimized 3D medical ultrasound imaging
No full textTwo-dimensional apertures provide fully electronic scanning for 3D medical ultrasound imaging. The design of planar arrays with a limited number of active elements yielding real-time 3D high-quality imaging, for all beam scanning orientations, is one of the current challenges. In this paper, an innovative transmission/reception solution, that involves a compact fully sampled 256-element array as transmitter and an optimized 256-element sparse array as receiver, able to fulfill all the previous requirements, is proposed. The sparse array is made up of a thinned version of the transmitter dense array (i.e., a proper subset of elements is used both to transmit and receive) surrounded by an annular sparse off-the-grid array. Both the positions and the weights of the sparse array are jointly optimized by minimizing a novel cost function by means of simulated annealing algorithm. The proposed solution is well suited for real-time 3D imaging over 360° of azimuth and ±40° of inclination
Ultrasound assessment of polymer-shelled magnetic microbubbles used as dual contrast agents
No full textConcentration estimation of ultrasound targeted microbubbles for improving cancer detection: A preliminary in VIVO study
No full textUltrasound imaging can be combined with specific targeted contrast agents for noninvasive detection of pathology using disease-associated molecular signatures. The quantification of contrast agents effectively bound to receptors indicative of disease can provide additional information on the presence of pathology. This paper focuses on the opportunity of exploiting the echoes produced by targeted contrast agents to remotely estimate the volumetric
concentration in a desired resolution cell. Tumor growth was induced by subcutaneous injection of prostate cancer cells in mice. A contrast-enhanced specific technique was used to image the region of interest subdivided in resolution cells of 1 mm-side. Radio frequency data were acquired for offline
processing. A method based on the support vector machine was employed to estimate the contrast agent concentration in each resolution cell. The preliminary in vivo experiments demonstrated a correlation between the extent of the primary tumor and the estimated concentrations. The combination of
molecular imaging and contrast agent quantification provides the potential for earlier characterization of pathologies on molecular level
On the Robustness of Multi-Pulse Techniques Against Undesired Effects in Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound Imaging
No full textEnergy and feature-based strategies for estimating the contrast agent concentration in ultrasound medical imaging
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A method for estimating the microbubble concentration in contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging
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