A Preliminary Study on a Novel Phantom Based Method for Performance Evaluation of Clinical Colour Doppler Systems

Andrea Scorza, Daniele Pietrobon, Francesco Orsini, Salvatore Andrea Sciuto

Abstract

Ultrasound Colour Flow is an imaging technique that combines velocity with anatomical information obtained by means of ultrasonic Doppler techniques and pulse-echo methods respectively to generate colour coded maps of the blood flow velocity superimposed on grey-level images of the tissue anatomy. Ultrasound Colour Flow Imaging (CFI) has been found to be effective in assessing blood flow in many clinical conditions and its use is widespread in many diagnostic applications. Although this technique for obtaining the blood velocity information is technically demanding and requires specific tests for its assessment, a shared worldwide standard on CFI equipment testing is not published yet and in the scientific literature there is no agreement on the choice of parameters to be tested, measurements methods and the timing of the test. After a brief introduction to the main principles and main methods in the scientific literature for quality assessment of CFI systems, a novel phantom based method is proposed and applied for a quantitative analysis of the performances of a commercial ultrasound scanner. Finally first results are shown and commented.

Keywords

Ultrasound, Colour Doppler, quality assessment, Colour Flow Imaging, phantoms, velocity measurement

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DOI

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IMEKO TC

TC4 - Measurement of Electrical Quantities

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