Ultrasound B-model imaging using adapted time of flight for ultrasound fat measurement sensor

Abstract

This paper presents an overview and result of the application of adapted B-mode imaging for measurement of chicken intramuscular fat content. Adapted B-mode imaging was proposed to increase the positioning accuracy of B-mode image with the objective to correct the phase error due to used of predetermined ultrasonic velocity in conventional B-mode imaging. The positioning accuracy of adaptive and conventional B-mode imaging was validated using 144 chicken samples. Adapted B-mode image has better positioning accuracy compared to conventional B-mode image since the method used was able to detect the thickness of the chicken sample with a lower mean difference (0.036±0.034mm Vs 0.113±0.010). Both methods were then applied for measurement of intramuscular fat content. Histogram mean and percentages of fat pixel is the Bmode image characteristic was extracted and correlation with the fat content was analyzed. Adaptive B-mode image properties correlate better with fat content compared to conventional Bmode image with correlation coefficient, r for the histogram mean (0.357 Vs 0.129) and percentages of fat pixel (0.406 Vs 0.289). The paper shows the potential of ultrasound adaptive Bmode imaging for application as chicken intramuscular fat measurement technique.