The process of echo-signal demodulation within the display stage of ultrasonic image formation discards signal phase. It has long been hypothesized that demodulation could be eliminating important clinical task information but the tools to study this effect were not developed. We have now developed a task-energy analysis to show how signal energy flows through different stages of image formation. In this paper, we show how traditional displaystage processing eliminates high spatial-frequency task information, and how simple methods can recover the loss for improved diagnostic performance. We also study the improvement in detecting breast microcalcifications using the proposed method.

Date Published: 11 March 2014
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9037, Medical Imaging 2014: Image Perception, Observer Performance, and Technology Assessment, 90370W (11 March 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2043955

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9037:
Medical Imaging 2014: Image Perception, Observer Performance, and Technology Assessment
Claudia R. Mello-Thoms; Matthew A. Kupinski, Editor(s)