Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is widely used in coronary artery examination. Ultrasonic elastography combined with IVUS is very conspicuous in identifying plaque component and in detecting plaque vulnerability degree. In this study, a simulation model of the blood vessel based on finite element analysis (FEA) was established. The vessel walls generally have radial changes caused by different intravascular pressure. The signals at lower pressures were used as the pre-deformation data and the signals at higher pressure were used as the post-deformation data. Displacement distribution was constructed using the time-domain cross-correlation method, and then strain images. By comparison of elastograms under different pressures, we obtained the optimal pressure step. Furthermore, on the basis of the obtained optimize pressure step, the simulation results showed that this method could effectively distinguish characteristics between different component plaques, and could guide the later experiments and clinical applications.
Angiography ; Arteries ; diagnostic imaging ; pathology ; Elasticity Imaging Techniques ; Finite Element Analysis ; Humans ; Plaque, Atherosclerotic ; diagnostic imaging ; Pressure

An intravascular ultrasound-enhanced thrombolysis excitation system with adjustable frequency, amplitude and duty cycle was designed based on FPGA (ZYNQ-7Z020). Firstly, the FPGA generated waveform amplitude binary data based on direct digital frequency synthesis (DDS) technology, and then the data was converted into burst signal through an external daughter card, which included D/A conversion circuit, active low-pass filter, power amplifier circuit and impedance matching circuit. The test results demonstrated that the output waveform reached the target with advantages of simple implementation and flexible control, the peak negative pressure generated from ultrasound transducer was doubled by means of an electrical impedance matching network. In vitro thrombus models were applied to verify the excitation system, it turned out that ultrasound cavitation effect generated could accelerate the penetration of urokinase and increase the thrombolysis rate by about 20%.
Amplifiers, Electronic ; Electric Impedance ; Thrombolytic Therapy ; Ultrasonography ; Ultrasonography, Interventional

Multi-angle plane-wave beamforming algorithm is the basis of ultra-fast ultrasonic imaging. It can be used to improve the imaging frame rate and resolution of traditional focused ultrasound. However, the existing multi-angle plane-wave technology can not satisfy the real-time imaging requirements due to the huge amount of computation required by CPU. In this paper, We proposed a parallel processing method to reduce the computation time based on compute unified device architecture(CUDA). Simulation analysis and contrast experiment were conducted to verify its performance. Experimental results show that the execution time based on GPU is much less than that based on CPU, thus the computational speed is accelerated significantly to satisfy the demand of ultrafast imaging.

The ultrasound endoscopic probes with very small size transducers are normally imaging by focused ultrasound beamforming technology. So the imaging frame rate is not very high, which cannot meet the needs of some clinical applications based on high imaging rate. In recent years, plane-wave ultrafast imaging technology can obtain high image frame rate and guarantee the image quality. In this paper, a plane wave ultra-fast imaging technique based on a home-made small line array ultrasound transducer is presented. Feasibility of the method is verified by simulation estimations and phantom experiments. The results show that for the small size transducer design of plane wave ultrafast imaging, it is necessary to fully consider the combination of the array element width and the number of array elements. So that a good plane wave imaging quality can be obtained. It lays a foundation for the ultra-fast imaging of plane wave in the interventional ultrasound imaging and ultrasound endoscopy.
Phantoms, Imaging ; Transducers ; Ultrasonography ; instrumentation