Image processing and pre-processing for medical ultrasound

Much attention is now being focused on techniques to improve the quality and information content of ultrasonic images of the body. Many of these techniques employ digital pre-processing of coherent echo signals prior to image generation. Examples of these procedures include: resolution enhancement; contrast enhancement (using frequency-domain techniques) to suppress speckle; and imaging of spectral parameters (which sense the sizes and concentrations of sub-resolution tissue constituents). Combinations of spectral parameters and ancillary clinical data (e.g., PSA blood levels) are also being used with statistical classifiers (e.g., discriminant analysis neural network) to generate color-coded, images that indicate tissue type (e.g., cancer) or tissue regions responding to therapy. Sets of these images, obtained-from serial-plane scans, promise to be particularly useful when presented in interactive three-dimensional (3-D) formats.