Evaluation of the Gray Scale Intensity Variation of Ultrasonic Images from Porcine Muscle Tissue as a Function of Temperature

Ultrasonography is one of the most widely used diagnostic imaging methods currently available because of its low cost and easy access. However, it does not present an image with detail level such as that observed with the magnetic resonance technique, for example. In view of this, a new ultrasound image processing modality that uses temperature variation as a form of disturbance of the medium to obtain a better contrast was proposed by Teixeira et al., 2018. It was observed that images acquired at different temperatures presented different contrast, which led us to believe that it would be possible to observe changes in the intensity of the ultrasonic signal with the heating of the medium. Thus, the present study aims to determine the smallest possible region in the image whose variation of the intensity of the grayscale pixels generates a perceptible contrast to the eyes of the observer. This difference was the result of the variation of the pixel intensity that generated the images of biological tissue during the temperature increase.