T-STATISTIC METHOD FOR SUPPRESSING ARTIFACTS IN BLOOD VESSEL ULTRASONIC IMAGING

摘要

A technique for enhancing the image quality in intravascular ultrasound imaging increases contrast between blood and vessel wall processes image data using a point-wise t-statistic technique. Data from an ultrasound transducer is digitized and stored in a memory buffer [500]. For each point in the image, a t-statistic value is derived from signal amplitude values for the same point at a sequence of previous frames [502]. An image is then generated and displayed using the t-statistic values for the intensity of each point [504]. The improvement in contrast ratio as compared to averaging techniques is most significant at highly oblique angles when contrast ratio is particularly poor in the unprocessed signal.