A Comparison of the Sensitivity of Contrast-Specific Imaging Modes on Clinical and Preclinical Ultrasound Scanners

Ultrasonic contrast agents are used routinely to aid clinical diagnosis. All premium- and mid-range scanners utilise contrast-specific imaging techniques to preferentially isolate and display the nonlinear signals generated from the microbubbles when insonated with a series of ultrasound pulses. In this manuscript the abilities of four premium ultrasound scanners to detect and display the ultrasound signal from two commercially available contrast agents—SonoVue and DEFINITY®—are compared. A flow phantom was built using tubes with internal diameters of 1.6 mm and 3.2 mm, suspended at depths of 1, 5 and 8 cm and embedded in tissue-mimicking material. Dilute solutions of SonoVue and DEFINITY® were pumped through the phantom at 0.25 mL/s and 1.5 mL/s. Four transducers were used to scan the tubes—a GE Logiq E9 (C2-9) curvilinear probe, a Philips iU22 L9-3 linear array probe, an Esaote MyLab Twice linear array LA523 (4–13 MHz) and a Fujifilm VisualSonics Vevo3100 MX250 (15–30 MHz) linear array probe. We defined a new parameter to compare the ability of the ultrasound scanners to display the contrast enhancement. This was defined as the ratio of grey-scale intensity ratio in contrast-specific imaging mode relative to the B-mode intensity from the same region-of-interest within the corresponding B-mode image. The study demonstrated that the flow rates used in this study had no effect on the contrast-specific imaging mode to B-mode (CSIM-BM) ratio for the three clinical scanners studied, with SonoVue demonstrating broadly similar CSIM-BM ratios across all 3 clinical scanners. DEFINITY® also displayed similar results to SonoVue except when insonated with the Esaote MyLab Twice LA523 transducer, where it demonstrated significantly higher CSIM-BM ratios at superficial depths