Investigation on Ultrasound Long Bone Fracture Imaging Using the Migration Method

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging plays a critical role in diagnostics in biomedicine because of its safety, nature, and low cost. Conventional ultrasound systems form images using a focused beam during transmission and dynamic focusing during the reception. The area under examination can be simultaneously insonified using a plane wave, which allows for ultrafast data capture rates but lowers image quality. The resultant image can be improved by coherent plane-wave compounding, in which numerous plane waves are released at different angles to produce distinct image datasets that are then blended to improve the final composite image. This study used the Fourier-domain technique for coherent plane-wave compounding image reconstruction from the image produced by conventional ultrasound to investigate the quality of the image produced compared to the X-ray image. To establish the merits and limitations of this approach, the researchers provided quantitative comparisons with the images obtained by the X-ray machine. The evaluation results are based on the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean, and variance. The results obtained showed that the migration method can precisely image the cortical bone fracture and offer good contrast between the bone tissue and the subcutaneous tissues.