Angle-independent estimation of maximum velocity through stenoses using vector Doppler ultrasound.

Categorisation for arterial stenoses treatment is determined primarily by the degree of occlusion, which is often estimated ultrasonically from blood velocity measurements. In current single-beam ultrasound (US) systems, this estimate can suffer from gross errors due to angle-dependence. The purpose of this study was to find out if an experimental dual-beam US system could reduce the angle-dependence of the velocity estimates. We compared four dual-beam velocity estimation algorithms on both a string phantom and straight tube wall-less flow phantoms incorporating symmetrical and asymmetrical stenoses from 0% to 91% by area. The estimated maximum velocity varied, on average, by 7.6% for beam-vessel angles from 40 degrees to 80 degrees. The fluctuation in the magnitude estimate was reduced by a factor of 2.6 using a hybrid single-dual-beam algorithm. We conclude that, when the true velocity lies in the scan plane, the dual-beam system reduces the angle-dependence and, thus, has the potential to improve categorisation of patients with arterial stenoses.

Lesion classification using skin patterning.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: The observation that skin line patterning tends to be disrupted by malignant but not non-malignant skin lesions suggests that this could be used as an aid to lesion differentiation. Since recognised differentiating features can be obtained from the simply-captured white light optical image, the possibility of using such images for skin pattern disruption detection is worth exploring. METHODS: The skin pattern has been extracted from optical images by high-pass filtering and profiles of local line strength variation with the angle estimated using a new consistent high-value profiling technique. The resultant profile images have been analysed using a novel region-based agglomerative clustering technique (mRAC) and also a local variance measurement. A measure based on the relationship between the classification results and an intensity-based segmentation was calculated, and this represented the disruption of the skin line patterning. RESULTS: A set of images containing a variety of histologically confirmed malignant and non-malignant lesions was analysed. The computed textural disruption figure was compared to both the histological diagnosis and to a visual estimate of patterning disruption for each image. It was demonstrated that lesion separation could be achieved by both analysis methods, with a good correlation with visual estimate of disruption and with mRAC providing the best performance. CONCLUSIONS: It was concluded that the acquisition and modelling of skin line patterning from clinical images of skin lesions had been successfully achieved and that the analysis of the resulting data provided an assessment of pattern disruption that is both consistent with visual inspection and effective in presenting information useful for discrimination between melanoma and benign naevi lesion examples.

Velocity bias and fluctuation in the standard dual beam Doppler reconstruction algorithm.

Bias and fluctuation of the standard velocity reconstruction algorithm for dual beam vector Doppler velocity estimation systems are analyzed; both magnitude and angle properties are considered. Bias can arise from any of the error sources known to affect single beam systems in addition to both translation and angle misregistration between the two sample volumes; standard deviation is the result of random temporal fluctuations in Doppler frequency estimates in each beam. Approximate closed-form expressions for both biases and standard deviations of the velocity estimates are derived, and the performance of a typical practical dual beam system is discussed as an illustration of the theory.

Error propagation bounds in dual and triple beam vector Doppler ultrasound.

Measurement of the velocity components along two (three) directions enables the two (three)-dimensional velocity vector to be estimated exactly. However, in practical systems employing such multiple beam techniques, there will usually be errors in the measured velocity components along each beam, which will lead to errors in the estimated velocity magnitude and direction. This error propagation problem is analyzed in both two and three dimensions by decomposition of the velocity estimation matrix, and exact upper and lower bounds are derived for both the magnitude and angle bias as a function of the angle between the beams. The bias in triple beam systems is shown to have identical bounds to that in dual beam systems with an equivalent interbeam angle. It is found that small errors in the individual beam velocity components can be magnified in the final determination of velocity magnitude and angle. Plots are presented to assist system designers to specify the interbeam angle(s) to avoid gross velocity estimation errors.

Lumen pressure within obliquely insonated absorbent solid cylindrical shells with application to Doppler flow phantoms.

Flow phantoms used in medical ultrasound usually employ a plastic tube as a blood vessel mimic. These tubes often have acoustic properties differing significantly from the tissue and blood-mimicking media, which results in distortion of the acoustic pressure field within the tubes and, hence, of the Doppler flow spectra. Previous analyses of this problem have used some form of the infinite plate transmission coefficient, although at least one ray-based analysis has considered a cylindrical interface but with zero wall thickness. In this paper, we compare these approximate pressure fields with the exact solution for oblique incidence on a viscoelastic cylindrical shell at 5 MHz to find for which materials the plate approximation is valid. The shell has water both inside and outside, but it can be modified to use a different fluid inside and also to include absorption in either fluid. We find the plate approximation is reasonable for soft tubes such as the copolymer Cflex (Cole-Palmer, Niles, IL) but much less so for hard tubes such as polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA).

A simulation study of sample volume sensitivity for oblique pulsed finite beam insonation of Doppler ultrasound flow phantom cylindrical vessels.

Our previous analysis of the lumen pressure in Doppler ultrasound flow phantoms subject to continuous wave, infinite beam excitation is extended here to consider the pressure and Doppler sample volume complex sensitivity within a range of solid absorbent tubes typical of those used in Doppler ultrasound flow phantoms insonated with a focussed pulsed ultrasound beam. The beam may be incident on the cylindrical shell from any angle and with any offset from the shell axis. The examples considered are of a 5 MHz beam with a 6 dB lateral fullwidth of 1 mm at the focus and a transducer surface acceleration pulse with standard deviation of 1 micros propagating through 10 mm outer diameter, 8 mm inner diameter, Cflex, low-density polyethylene (LDPE), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), and polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) shells surrounded by water at various beam-vessel angles. Our results confirm earlier analyses suggesting that PMMA, being less well matched to the surrounding media, causes much greater distortion of the sample volume sensitivity than Cflex.

Sample volume misregistration in linear array-based dual beam Doppler ultrasound systems.

Large velocity estimation errors can occur in dual beam Doppler ultrasound velocity measurement systems when there is left/right sample volume misregistration, particularly when the interbeam angle is small. Such misregistration will occur when there is tissue inhomogeneity. This is investigated for a typical type of inhomogeneity--a layer of fat--by calculating the amount of both angle and translation misregistration occurring in such a system realized using a single linear array transducer. The complex sample volume sensitivity is calculated using a modified time domain approach, combining the spatial impulse response method with ray tracing. The effects on these misregistrations of altering the aperture sizes and their relative positions on the array is then investigated to derive an improved aperture configuration for dual beam velocity estimation. Arrangements with transmit apertures wider than the receive apertures are shown to be preferable in this context.

Velocity fluctuation reduction in vector Doppler ultrasound using a hybrid single/dual-beam algorithm.

In order to reduce the fluctuations in the velocity magnitude estimate, we propose a modification to the standard algorithm for reconstructing the (two component) vector velocity from the measured Doppler shifts in two directions. This uses the standard dual-beam algorithm, combined with temporal smoothing, to find only the velocity angle, then uses the single-beam algorithm to estimate the velocity magnitude. We present initial data showing the significant reduction in velocity estimate fluctuation that this hybrid method achieves compared to the standard algorithm.

Analysis of skin line pattern for lesion classification.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: It has been observed that skin patterning tends to be disrupted by malignant but not by benign skin lesions. This suggests that measurements of skin pattern disruption on simply captured white light optical skin images could be a useful contribution to a diagnostic feature set. Previous work using a measurement of line strength by a consistent high-value profiling technique followed by local variance measurement or a region agglomerative classifier to measure skin line pattern disruption was extremely promising but computationally intensive, suggesting that the idea of measuring skin pattern disruption was useful but a simpler method was required. METHODS: The skin pattern was extracted by high-pass filtration and enhanced by adaptive anisotropic (spatial variant) filtering which smoothes along skin lines but not across them. The skin line main direction and direction variance were estimated using a local image gradient matrix and the difference of these measures across the lesion image boundary was used as a lesion classifier. RESULTS: A set of images of malignant melanoma and benign naevi were processed as above and the scatter plot of results in a two-dimensional feature (line direction and line variation difference) space showed excellent separation of benign and malignant lesions. An ROC plot enclosed an area of 0.88. CONCLUSIONS: The experimental results showed that the local line direction and the local line variation were promising features for distinguishing malignant melanoma from benign lesion and the methods used were effective and computationally low-cost.