In this paper, the relationship between image intensity and ultrasound contrast agent (UCA) concentration is investigated. Experiments are conducted in water bath using a silicon tube filled with UCA (SonoVue) at different concentrations (100μl/l to 6000μl/l) at around 37 °C to simulate the temperature in human body. The mean gray-scale intensity within the region of interest (ROI) is calculated to obtain the plot of signal intensity to UCA concentration. The results show that the intensity firstly exhibits a linear increase to the peak at approximately 1500μl/l then appears a downward trend due to the multiple scattering (MS) effects.
KEYWORDS: Ultrasonography, Tumors, In vitro testing, In vivo imaging, Liver, Video, Veins, Signal attenuation, Life sciences, Toxic industrial chemicals
Nanoscale bubbles (nanobubbles) have been reported to improve contrast in tumor-targeted ultrasound imaging due to the enhanced permeation and retention effects at tumor vascular leaks. In this work, a self-made nanobubble ultrasound contrast agent was preliminarily characterized and evaluated in-vitro and in-vivo. Fundamental properties such as morphology appearance, size distribution, zeta potential, bubble concentration (bubble numbers per milliliter contrast agent suspension) and the stability of nanobubbles were assessed by light microscope and particle sizing analysis. Then the concentration intensity curve and time intensity curves (TICs) were acquired by ultrasound imaging experiment in-vitro. Finally, the contrast-enhanced ultrasonography was performed on rat to investigate the procedure of liver perfusion. The results showed that the nanobubbles had good shape and uniform distribution with the average diameter of 507.9 nm, polydispersity index (PDI) of 0.527, and zeta potential of -19.17 mV. Significant contrast enhancement was observed in in-vitro ultrasound imaging, demonstrating that the self-made nanobubbles can enhance the contrast effect of ultrasound imaging efficiently in-vitro. Slightly contrast enhancement was observed in in-vivo ultrasound imaging, indicating that the nanobubbles are not stable enough in-vivo. Future work will be focused on improving the ultrasonic imaging performance, stability, and antibody binding of the nanoscale ultrasound contrast agent.
Image fusion quality assessment plays a critically important role in the field of medical imaging. To evaluate image fusion quality effectively, a lot of assessment methods have been proposed. Examples include mutual information (MI), root mean square error (RMSE), and universal image quality index (UIQI). These image fusion assessment methods could not reflect the human visual inspection effectively. To address this problem, we have proposed a novel image fusion assessment method which combines the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) with the regional mutual information in this paper. In this proposed method, the source medical images are firstly decomposed into different levels by the NSCT. Then the maximum NSCT coefficients of the decomposed directional images at each level are obtained to compute the regional mutual information (RMI). Finally, multi-channel RMI is computed by the weighted sum of the obtained RMI values at the various levels of NSCT. The advantage of the proposed method lies in the fact that the NSCT can represent image information using multidirections and multi-scales and therefore it conforms to the multi-channel characteristic of human visual system, leading to its outstanding image assessment performance. The experimental results using CT and MRI images demonstrate that the proposed assessment method outperforms such assessment methods as MI and UIQI based measure in evaluating image fusion quality and it can provide consistent results with human visual assessment.
Pulse response of the underwater wireless optical channel is significant for the analysis of channel capacity and error probability. Traditional vector radiative transfer theory (VRT) is not able to deal with the effect of receiving aperture. On the other hand, general water tank experiments cannot acquire an accurate pulse response due to the limited time resolution of the photo-electronic detector. We present a Monte Carlo simulation model to extract the time-domain pulse response undersea. In comparison with the VRT model, a more accurate pulse response for practical ocean communications could be achieved through statistical analysis of the received photons. The proposed model is more reasonable for the study of the underwater optical channel.
The technique of laser magnetic resonance was used to investigate the 3(rho) 1- 3(rho) 0 transition within the 6s6p 3(Rho) excited states of atomic mercury. The isotope shifts of Hg in the 3(rho) 1-3(rho) 0 transition were directly determined. The results are: (Delta) (nu) IS198,200 equals -26.2 +/- 3.0 MHz, (Delta) (nu) IS198,202 equals -55.8 +/- 3.0 MHz, (Delta) (nu) IS198,204 equals -82.6 +/- 3.0 MHz. Their results are more accurate than those of previous studies.
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