Ultrasonography is a non-invasive diagnostic technique using ultrasound to produce images of internal body structures in real-time. It is a reliable, robust and reproducible diagnostic imaging modality commonly used in the clinical practice. Nevertheless, artefacts may occur in images, leading to misdiagnosis. This paper aims to characterize the reverberation artefact that causes multiple copies of anatomic structures interfaces, degrading image quality and accuracy. Analyzing and defining the mechanical characteristic properties of the ultrasound probe play a crucial role in the reduction of reverberations. A simplified two-dimensional mathematical model was developed to simulate the response of an ultrasound transducer to a phantom specially designed to generate reverberations. Such model was verified by a water tank experiment using a dedicated set-up. The investigation of a single matching layer transducer showed good results: 2=0.987 for the correlation between the arrival time of the echoes of simulated and experimental signals, and a value of 2=0.945 for the correlation of their intensity, at the central frequency. These preliminary results show that the developed model allows investigating whether changes in the constitutive characteristics of the individual transducer layers reduce reverberations and helps to predict transducer performance in terms of image quality.
A Mathematical Model for Reverberations in Biomedical Ultrasound Transducers: A case study / Ramona De Luca, Michele Bassani, Lorenzo Francalanci, Francesco Bertocci, Francesca Gelli, Paolo Palchetti , Davide Coppini, Leonardo Bocchi. - ELETTRONICO. - (2018), pp. 1-6. (Intervento presentato al convegno 13th IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications, MeMeA 2018 tenutosi a Universita La Sapienza, ita nel 2018) [10.1109/MeMeA.2018.8438731].
A Mathematical Model for Reverberations in Biomedical Ultrasound Transducers: A case study
Leonardo Bocchi
2018
Abstract
Ultrasonography is a non-invasive diagnostic technique using ultrasound to produce images of internal body structures in real-time. It is a reliable, robust and reproducible diagnostic imaging modality commonly used in the clinical practice. Nevertheless, artefacts may occur in images, leading to misdiagnosis. This paper aims to characterize the reverberation artefact that causes multiple copies of anatomic structures interfaces, degrading image quality and accuracy. Analyzing and defining the mechanical characteristic properties of the ultrasound probe play a crucial role in the reduction of reverberations. A simplified two-dimensional mathematical model was developed to simulate the response of an ultrasound transducer to a phantom specially designed to generate reverberations. Such model was verified by a water tank experiment using a dedicated set-up. The investigation of a single matching layer transducer showed good results: 2=0.987 for the correlation between the arrival time of the echoes of simulated and experimental signals, and a value of 2=0.945 for the correlation of their intensity, at the central frequency. These preliminary results show that the developed model allows investigating whether changes in the constitutive characteristics of the individual transducer layers reduce reverberations and helps to predict transducer performance in terms of image quality.
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