Duke Medical Imaging Laboratory: Ultrasound Tools
Welcome to the ultrasound section of the Duke Medical Imaging
Laboratory webpage. We are developing two tools that will
be helpful for students interested in learning about medical
ultrasound. The first is a virtual ultrasound machine, that
demonstrates the operation of a typical commercially available
diagnostic ultrasound scanner. The second is a tutorial that
provides access to the pressure field simulation software package
that we use for much of our research.
Virtual Ultrasound Machine
The virtual machine takes you through all of the user controlled
settings on a typical diagnostic ultrasound machine, and
demonstrates the effect that these settings have on an image. More
information on using the virtual ultrasound machine is available on our
help page. To run the virtual machine requires a browser compatible
with Java 1.1 (either Netscape
4.5, or Internet Explorer
4.0). If you are running Netscape 4.5, or Internet Explorer
4.0, click
here to view the virtual ultrasound machine. If you are running
Netscape 4.0x on a Windows machine, you can download
Sun's Java
1.1 Plug-in before proceeding to our
plug-in
page. Please be patient while waiting for the applet to load,
especially if you are connected via modem. If you are having problems
running the applet, please email
us with a description of the error.
Pressure Field Simulation
Simulations of system design and idealized
experimental conditions are often used to
build intuition about the performance of an ultrasound system.
In our research group, we use a pressure field simulation
software package called
Field II , written by
Dr. Joergen Jensen, of the Technical University of Denmark.
This is a public
domain simulation package, which Dr. Jensen has made available under
several different operating systems.
Field_II is written in MATLAB
. In order for you to
use the Field_II tutorial, you must have MATLAB running on
your machine. You must then do the following:
1) If Field_II is not currently available on your machine,
Download the Field_II code
for your operating system
into a directory that matlab
has access to (typically your $HOME/matlab directory).
2)
Download the Field_II Graphical User
Interface , into the same directory.
The files that you downloaded in steps 1 and 2 above are
tar'd and compressed. You must use the following command to
access the files:
% gunzip filename.tar.gz
% tar xf filename.tar
where in this case filename.tar.gz is Field_II_GUI.tar.gz and filename.tar is
Field_II_GUI.tar
Once you have downloaded these tools, run through the
matlab tutorial, which will teach you how to use them.