Consensus standards for acquisition, measurement, and reporting of intravascular optical coherence tomography studies: a report from the International Working Group for Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography Standardization and Validation

The purpose of this document is to make the output of the International Working Group for Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography (IWG-IVOCT) Standardization and Validation available to medical and scientific communities, through a peer-reviewed publication, in the interest of improving the diagnosis and treatment of patients with atherosclerosis, including coronary artery disease.

Computed Ultrasound Tomography in Echo mode (CUTE) of speed of sound for diagnosis and for aberration correction in pulse-echo sonography

Sound speed as a diagnostic marker for various diseases of human tissue has been of interest for a while. Up to now, mostly transmission ultrasound computed tomography (UCT) was able to detect spatially resolved sound speed, and its promise as a diagnostic tool has been demonstrated. However, UCT is limited to acoustically transparent samples such as the breast. We present a novel technique where spatially resolved detection of sound speed can be achieved using conventional pulse-echo equipment in reflection mode. For this purpose, pulse-echo images are acquired under various transmit beam directions and a two-dimensional map of the sound speed is reconstructed from the changing phase of local echoes using a direct reconstruction method. Phantom results demonstrate that a high spatial resolution (1 mm) and contrast (0.5 % of average sound speed) can be achieved suitable for diagnostic purposes. In comparison to previous reflection-mode based methods, CUTE works also in a situation with only diffuse echoes, and its direct reconstruction algorithm enables real-time application. This makes it suitable as an addition to conventional clinical ultrasound where it has the potential to benefit diagnosis in a multimodal approach. In addition, knowledge of the spatial distribution of sound speed allows full aberration correction and thus improved spatial resolution and contrast of conventional B-mode ultrasound. © (2014) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.