Quality conservation of ultrasonography images in mobile devices

Medical ultrasonography (US) is based on the correct evaluation of images. To guarantee the maintenance of consistent image quality over the lifetime of the device it is necessary to conduct periodic quality controls, consisting in image processing of images acquired from dedicated phantoms. At the present time mobile devices (e.g., iPad, Windows RT tablets, Android-based systems) are increasingly used for visualization of diagnostic images acquired by US machines, so images processing on this kind of hardware plays a crucial role in diagnostic imaging. In this paper we report an overview on the conservation of quality of the images transferred from the US consoles to remote electronic devices, in order to detect possible differences between homologous images. Moreover, always related to image quality controls, the Authors report about the development of an alternative procedure to quantitatively evaluate the US Functional Resolution (FR) parameter. To perform image conservation, image quality controls were conducted on eighteen different US systems and several parameters were evaluated by using a dedicated phantom, according to international and national technical protocols. The obtained images were analysed qualitatively and, if possible, quantitatively both on the US device (live analysis) and on a PC by using a dedicated LabView-based software (post processing). An iOS device was used for qualitative evaluations on the same images. The developed LabView-based application aims at measuring both directly and univocally the FR parameter, unlike the usual qualitative procedure that highly depends on medical staff capability. This alternative procedure allows to represent the anechoic structures as minima in the intensity vs. pixel graph. Thus, the measurement of the FR does not depend on the operator’s eye response.