Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound, Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA.
Ultrasound Med Biol. 2013 Jun;39(6):1026-38. doi: 10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2013.01.011. Epub 2013 Apr 3.
The mechanism of the twinkling artifact (TA) that occurs during Doppler ultrasound imaging of kidney stones was investigated. The TA expresses itself in Doppler images as time-varying color. To define the TA quantitatively, beam-forming and Doppler processing were performed on raw per channel radio-frequency data collected when imaging human kidney stones in vitro. Suppression of twinkling by an ensemble of computer-generated replicas of a single radio frequency signal demonstrated that the TA arises from variability among the acoustic signals and not from electronic signal capture or processing. This variability was found to be random, and its suppression by elevated static pressure and return when the pressure was released suggest that the presence of bubbles on the stone surface is the mechanism that gives rise to the TA.
研究了在肾结石的多普勒超声成像过程中出现的闪烁伪像（TA）的机制。TA 在多普勒图像中表现为时变的颜色。为了定量定义 TA，对在体外成像人肾结石时采集的每个通道原始射频数据进行波束形成和多普勒处理。通过对单个射频信号的一组计算机生成副本进行闪烁抑制，证明 TA 源于声信号的可变性，而不是电子信号捕获或处理。这种可变性是随机的，通过升高静态压力抑制并在压力释放时恢复，表明结石表面气泡的存在是产生 TA 的机制。
