Journal
JOURNAL OF CLINICAL ULTRASOUND
Volume 42, Issue 2, Pages 67-73Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/jcu.22093
Keywords
sonography; instrumentation; telemedicine; three-dimensional; space medicine
Funding
- CNES (French Space Agency)
- ESA (European Space Agency)
- ANR (National Agency for Research)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
PurposeTo design and test a new telesonography technique using remote volume acquisition by untrained operators in locations without access to trained sonographers, postprocessing, and interpretation done at expert centers. Materials and MethodsThe technique was tested with 84 sonograms of organs acquired in pregnant women (n=8) and patients with various abdominal pathologic conditions (n=11) located in French Guyana (France), Ceuta (Spain), and Murighiol (Romania). An operator inexperienced in sonography (US) placed the transducer over the predetermined acoustic window for each organ, then swept it from a -45 degrees to a +45 degrees position to scan the targeted organ. The acquired volume dataset was sent to an expert center via the Internet and reconstructed using a proprietary software, which allowed a trained sonographer to navigate through the appropriately reconstructed sonograms. ResultsAfter three-dimensional processing at the expert center, the organs scanned in the obstetrical cases were adequately visualized by the expert in seven of eight (88%) examinations of the fetal head, femur, and umbilical cord and eight of eight (100%) examinations of the fetal abdomen and placenta, whereas in the general abdominal cases, the liver, gallbladder, portal vein, and right kidney were correctly visualized in 10 of 11 (91%) examinations. ConclusionsTelesonography allowed untrained operators to scan and transfer the US volume datasets over the Internet to an expert center where an expert sonographer could navigate through the reconstructed US volume and visualize sonograms of diagnostic quality. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Ultrasound42:67-73, 2014
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available