(Sunday, 7/29/2018) 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Room: Exhibit Hall | Forum 1
Purpose: Ultrasound imaging presets provide a basis for clinical scanning which sonographers can further adjust. Traditionally vendor application specialists work with clinical users to set up presets in a slow, subjective process. This study aimed to determine a systematic approach to improve imaging presets and apply it for optimizing presets for abdominal scanning in ultrasound-guided intervention.
Methods: 1. Tasks were identified through qualitative feedback from radiologists and quantitatively by mining previous clinical exams. 2. CIRS 040 QC phantom was used to adjust global image contrast and tint. 3. Fine-tuning relevant parameters was achieved by scanning CIRS 057 abdominal phantom and volunteers without and with acoustic distortion layers. Consequently, new presets were determined and saved for three probes involved in intervention. 4. 17 abdominal views were identified corresponding to specific metrics such as spatial resolution and noise, and were acquired on three volunteers using original and new presets side-by-side, producing 51 image pairs. 5. A reader study was performed including 3 radiologists and 11 sonographers. Image pairs were anonymized and randomized, each shown with a specific image task question. 6. Signal noise ratios (SNR) of spherical lesions in Gammex 408 phantom were measured to benchmark the performance of two presets.
Results: The parameters changed included speckle reduction, dynamic range, gray map and rejection. For image review, new preset was preferred for 61.2% cases on average. There was a significant higher percentage of preference toward the new preset (p=0.022). Intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.792 among the 14 readers (p<0.001). New preset demonstrated better or equivalent lesion SNR at multiple depths. 78% intervention exams were performed with new presets in the 120 days after development.
Conclusion: An effective systematic method was established and applied to optimize abdominal preset, and resulted in new presets that were significantly preferred and highly utilized by clinical practice.
Keywords
Taxonomy
IM- Ultrasound : B-mode Imaging
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