New Diagnostic Ultrasound Tools Include Nuchal Translucency Scanning and High Definition Volume Imaging

One of two new ultrasound applications is a tool for undertaking the nuchal translucency (NT) examination.

NT scanning in B-mode is complex and challenging, requiring protected training, and each scan can take a long time. This is chiefly because finding the exact mid-sagittal plane, essential to performing an NT examination, is very difficult with two-dimensional (2D) scanning, especially as it is highly reliant on the position of the fetus. Volume NT should revolutionize this process. This new 3D technology from Medison (Seoul, Korea) provides considerable help to the user in assessing the true mid sagittal view from 3D data, and then will measure NT, if the user requests it to do so. Medison's Volume NT is unique, as other NT techniques are still based on 2D and less interactive processes.

Volume NT provides several benefits to the user and the patient. The NT scan will be far faster, and more accurate, enabling greater throughput and greater clinical confidence in the accuracy of the diagnosis. Moreover, because the process of finding the mid-sagittal plane and measuring NT is interactive in assisting the user and highly accurate, there will be much less variability among observers, giving much greater confidence in the observations.

HD Volume Imaging (HDVI) is a breakthrough in 3D volume resolution. It has long been known that 3D volume image resolution is lower for multiplanar multislice images than 2D. Recent developments have improved 3D image resolution, but only by using a 2D algorithm--this resulted in images that, although they had less speckle noise and better contrast than before, were considered artificial and over-processed by users. HDVI, based on nonstationary adaptive filtering by 3D matrix processing, is a true 3D process, retaining much more of the original information, and therefore producing much better 3D images.

HDVI provides excellent image quality and naturally clearer contrast, with excellent tissue differentiation, edge depiction, and speckle reduction, allowing consistent diagnoses with great confidence. It is particularly useful in the detection of subtle lesions, the examination of the walls and valves of the fetal heart, and the detection of subtle fetal brain defects.

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