Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research (대한의용생체공학회:의공학회지)

The Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering (대한의용생체공학회)
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Development of Flexible Ultrasound System for Elastography

탄성 영상법 개발을 위한 유연성 높은 초음파 시스템의 구현

  • Kim, D.I. (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University) ;
  • Lee, S.Y. (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University) ;
  • Cho, M.H. (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University)
  • 김동인 (경희대학교 생체의공학과) ;
  • 이수열 (경희대학교 생체의공학과) ;
  • 조민형 (경희대학교 생체의공학과)
  • Received : 2011.12.12
  • Accepted : 2012.02.28
  • Published : 2012.03.30
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Abstract

Recently, several ultrasound imaging techniques for tissue characterization have been developed. Among them, ultrasound elastography is regarded as the most promising modality and has been rapidly developed. One of ultrasound elastography techniques is shear modulus imaging. Normal and cancerous tissues show big difference of shear moduli and they have good image contrast. However shear wave elastography requires more complicated hardware and more computations for image reconstruction algorithm. Therefore new efficient techniques are being developed. In this paper, we have developed a very flexible ultrasound system for elastography experiments. The developed system has capabilities to acquire ultrasound RF data of all channels and generate arbitrary ultrasound pulse sequences. It has a huge amount of memories for RF data acquisition and a simple and flexible pulse generator. We have verified the performance of the system showing conventional B-mode images and preliminary results of elastography. The developed system will be used to verify our own reconstruction algorithm and to develop more efficient elastography techniques.

Keywords

References

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