Developing high-frequency ultrasound tomography for testicular tumor imaging in rats: An in vitro study
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan (China)
- Department of Electrical Engineering, Fu Jen Catholic University, New Taipei City 24205, Taiwan (China)
Purpose: This paper describes a feasibility study for developing a 35-MHz high-frequency ultrasound computed-tomography (HFUCT) system for imaging rat testicles. Methods: The performances of two kinds of HFUCT-attenuation and sound-speed UCT-based on transmission and pulse-echo modes were investigated in this study. Experiments were carried out using phantoms and actual rat testiclesin vitro. HFUCT images were reconstructed using a filtered backprojection algorithm. Results: The phantom experimental results indicated that all types of HFUCT can determine the dimensions of a plastic cylinder with a diameter of 500μm. Compared to sound-speed HFUCT, attenuation HFUCT exhibited a better performance in recognizing a tiny sclerosed region in a gelatin phantom. Therefore, the in vitro testicular experiments were performed using attenuation HFUCT based on transmission and pulse-echo modes. The experimentally measured attenuation coefficient and sound speed for healthy rat testicles were 2.92 ± 0.25 dB/mm and 1537 ± 25 m/s, respectively. Conclusions: A homogeneous texture was evident for healthy testicles using both modes. An artificial sclerosed tumor could also be clearly observed using two- and three-dimensional attenuation HFUCT in both modes. However, an object artifact was apparent in pulse-echo mode because of ultrasound beam refraction. All of the obtained experimental results indicate the potential of using HFUCT as a novel tool for monitoring the preclinical responses of testicular tumors in small animals.
- OSTI ID:
- 22250865
- Journal Information:
- Medical Physics, Vol. 41, Issue 1; Other Information: (c) 2014 American Association of Physicists in Medicine; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-2405
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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