In one study presented Monday at the American Roentgen Ray Society meeting in Seattle, the technology outperformed other advanced imaging techniques in many criteria. Compound imaging's ability to reconstruct ultrasound images from multiple angles in the scanning plane decreases speckle noise in normal tissue and also accentuates internal echoes in breast masses, said Dr. Karen Hunt of the University of Michigan.
Many lesions reveal clearer margins and internal features.
Harmonic imaging, meanwhile, uses second and subsequent frequencies created when multiple pulses are absorbed by the tissue. A third technique, pulse inversion, uses identical frequency pulses to either cancel out or amplify each other, increasing image clarity. In a study comparing compound and pulse inversion imaging with conventional ultrasound, Korean researchers found that compound imaging outperformed the competition handily in the areas of contrast, margin clarity, and internal echo clarity. Pulse inversion imaging outperformed compound imaging in terms of posterior echo. For that reason, Hunt said, it should be used as an adjunct to conventional imaging, not a replacement.