Abstract
Medical B-mode ultrasound is widely used for the examination of children’s limbs, including soft tissue, muscle, and bone. However, for the accurate examination of the bone only, it is often replaced by more restrictive clinical modalities. Several authors have investigated ultrasonic imaging of bone to assess cortical thickness and/or to estimate the wave velocity through the internal structure. The present work focuses on the transverse slice imaging process using reflection-mode ultrasound computed tomography (USCT). The method is valid for imaging soft tissues with similar acoustic impedances, but in the presence of bone, the higher contrasts alter the propagation of ultrasonic waves and reduce the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). There is a need to change the methods used for the processing of ultrasonic signals. Our group has developed a wavelet-based coded excitation (WCE) method to process information in frequency and time. The objective of this study is to use the method to improve reflection-mode USCT, at low ultrasonic intensities, to better address organ morphometry. Experimental results on a newborn arm phantom and on an ex vivo chicken drumstick are presented, and the usefulness of this WCE-mode USCT is discussed.
Highlights
In reflection mode with a single transducer or single array, ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) can be viewed as a combination of B-mode ultrasound for the physical acoustic propagation, and X-ray tomography for the image construction process [19]
Tomography is based on the principle that an object is determined by the set of its plane projections taken at different angles [31,32,33]
For the newborn arm phantom, two blood vessels are clearly visible in USCT at points 3 and 4 for H1, and 2 and 3 for H2 (Figure 13), whereas they were less differentiated from the constant reference medium in μCT with the settings chosen for this experiment
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In reflection mode with a single transducer or single array, USCT can be viewed as a combination of B-mode ultrasound for the physical acoustic propagation, and X-ray tomography for the image construction process [19] It is a linearized inversion of the inverse acoustic scattering problem corresponding to imaging perturbations of a known reference medium. Clinical B-mode ultrasound and USCT of soft tissues offer essentially the same resolutions, up to 100 μm for shallow tissue depths (
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