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Agile Ultrasound - The Next Revolution in Ultrasound Imaging
Introduction
Diagnostic use of ultrasound has greatly expanded over the past couple of decades because it offers many advantages as an imaging modality. Over that time, image quality has improved significantly, however, fundamental issues remain.
The human body consists of a variety of tissue types, each of which affects the ultrasound beam differently. It is theoretically possible to compensate for the sound characteristics of different tissue types, but because ultrasound must provide real-time images, the time permitted for computation of those corrections is short. Because of this time constraint, conventional ultrasound systems must limit computational complexity, making many simplifying assumptions about the body in order to achieve real-time imaging. This leads to compromised image quality and requires that the user make many system adjustments to compensate for the resulting reductions in image quality.
Advances in ultrasound system designs over the past ten years have made many improvements to the backend post processing capabilities, but have not addressed the fundamental acquisition of data that drives image quality. To address these issues, GE has developed a new Agile Acoustic Architecture that uses advanced models of sound interaction with different tissue types and powerful distributed intelligence to bring image quality to new levels.