B-Mode (2D) Imaging with the ECO 5: Chison Ultrasound Training Part 2 of 6
This second video in the Chison ECO 5 ultrasound training series addresses procedures for imaging with the ECO5 portable ultrasound machine.
This part gives hands-on training for performing imaging, optimizing images, and using all the features available during an ultrasound scan with the ECO 5.
Please be sure to view Part 1 of this ECO5 video training series to get the base understanding of how the ultrasound machine works and how to use various menus and functions. Some of the features you’ll find here are not included with the user manual.
For more hands-on ultrasound machine training, check out our full Ultrasound Machine Training library. And if you are looking to buy a Chison Ultrasound Machine, call one of our sales experts at (877) 661-8224 today or contact us to have a sales person connect with you at your convenience.
Links to all parts of the series can be found below the video:
http://providi.wistia.com/medias/nuy260k3f9?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640
Complete Chison ECO 5 Ultrasound Training Links:
Part 1: Chison ECO5 System Introduction and Tour
Part 2: ECO 5 2D Imaging
Part 3: Doppler and M-Mode on the Chison ECO 5
Part 4: Measurements and Annotations with the ECO 5
Part 5: Exporting and Reports on the ECO 5
Part 6: Chison ECO 5 System Setup and Customization
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Transcript to the video B-Mode (2D) Imaging with the Chison ECO5 portable Ultrasound Machine:
OK, so let’s get an imaging with the Chison ECO 5. First thing you’re going to want to do is enter patient information. You’ve got your patient information screen here. It automatically enters a patient ID. And you can enter whatever parameters you want here, including the study that you’re going to be doing, OB/GYN, cardiology, urology, et cetera. And these selections are for what will go on the report. And it’s not going to set the preset or annotations. We’ll get to that when we select the probe.
So, to start with the patient, you’ll want to select which study you’re going to do, and then also you’ll want to enter a name. Something strange about it is if you hold down the Shift key and type a letter, it’s not going to let you do it. So if you want it capital, you hit the Shift once. I’ll hit Shift and then it goes capital, the next one will be lowercase.
So I’m going to write test. So I hit the Shift key, let go, hit T, and then I can continue typing E-S-T. That’s all I really need to start a study. And this is all for a new patient, and I can go ahead and click OK. There’s also a way to select previous exams by going to the archive here. And it’ll pull up– this is a new system so it doesn’t have any patients on it. It would select these patients here, and you would be able to click on a patient and start a new exam for that patient, or possibly continue an exam for that patient and review, which we’ll get into a later screen.
Since I’m going to do a new patient, I’m going to exit and then do a new patient again. And I’m going to go ahead and type in that test now. And then I can just go ahead and click OK and it’s going to go ahead and start the exam. All it really needs is the patient ID. It’s a good idea to have a name with it but if you’re just doing this for learning it, you don’t need to have the patient name in there. So let’s go ahead and click OK.
Now, the next thing we want to do is select our probe, right here. And this, if there are two probes plugged in, both of these will be highlighted. I just have one now, and it has this selection of presets for imaging, annotations, and the measurement analysis package. So when you select this, the image will be optimized for whatever it is you’re looking at here. And then when you hit the Calcs button, it’ll pull up the calculation specific to that modality and also the annotations library will be associated with it as well.
If you do not see the study that you want here, say, you have a convex probe and you wanted a vascular exam, there will be a part in this setup where you can add different presets to this and you can also create your own preset, which will be in the system setup section. So right now, we’ll just click vascular. And up here we have our patient ID and then the patient name, which is test. And then it says we’re in a vascular exam.
So for the quickest thing to get started, most people want to know how to freeze and save an image. It’s pretty simple, you’re just going to do Freeze key here. And then it shows my Cine review here. It says there’s 256 frames to scroll through, and I can scroll back through the image. You can see the frame number here. And if I want to save that particular image, I’m just going to hit Save. And see how it pops up down here. If I want to save that whole loop, I can hit that film strip and it will save the entire loop.
Now, note that it takes a while to save all 256 frames in the system. There is a way where you could save just a portion of that clip so you don’t have to wait for this every time. Say you just have a second or so that you want to save. You can use this trackball here and hit the Enter key to select. Note that this whole part went black. And then I’ll hit this, and it’s highlighting just this part. If hit this Play/Pause, you’ll see how it just plays that little section. And I can pause it and say, OK, that’s what I want to save.
So I’ll hit that again, and notice how much faster it saves. This will also be faster in exporting and saved hard drive space in the long run. These are also menus to help you scroll through the Cine loop. You can change the play speed. When I’m playing it, you can go higher or lower. You can delete this. You can send it to a DICOM. And then Previous or Next will take you to the previous clip. Let’s go ahead and unfreeze.
And now just in standard 2D imaging, let’s learn how to optimize the image a little bit. You have your frequency, dynamic range, I-image, compound, and 2B. The frequency is pretty straightforward. You can change the frequency, lower if you want better penetration or higher if you want more. The dynamic range is another image optimization tool. And if you’re interested in learning more about something like that, we do have a series on our website about image optimization and what all those functions do because it’s further than we’d want to go into this training video.
I-image is a preprogram set created by Chison to help improve image quality. And you could select through these to see if it automatically optimizes the image to what you’d like to see. And if not, you can adjust your own controls such as the gain, et cetera. This is compound imaging, right here. It says it’s on.
And then below it is speckle reduction imaging. You could turn speckle reduction off, but in order to do so, you must turn compound off first, and then turn speckle reduction on and off, and then you could turn compound back on. Any time you want to adjust the speckle reduction, you first need to turn compound on or off in order to get it in the setting that you want. Again, all that compound imaging and speckle reduction is also in that image optimization guide.
The 2B gives you a split screen image here. And in order to just keep changing between the two, I’m just going to tab the probe here. You can just hit 2B and pull up a second image, and each one will be live. And depending on which one you want to see, you could just hit back and forth, and then you can freeze both images. Now, if you’re doing AFI or something of that sort, you can unfreeze.
And now we have one of the first hidden menus. We’re going to push down this menu, and we can twist it to scroll up to 4B. So I’m going to go to 4B and then I’m going to hit and continue to push down for each image to scroll through. And then you can freeze when you’re done, and you have your four images there. And when you get to measurements, you’ll learn how to take the measurements on each one of those images. So now we can unfreeze and press the B button to go back to standard 2D imaging.
And also we’ll find some other things in this menu here. Our scan width, we can change it to increase the frame rate. We can scroll up to that, push down, and make that adjustment to change the scan width. And that’ll help increase frame rates. Focus number, press it down, twist, changes the number of focal zones.
Persistence, which is also known as frame averaging, density is line density, smoothness of the image, edge enhancement, acoustic power, zoom coefficient– how much it zoomed when you’re there. MB is an image optimization function that is proprietary to Chison. If it’s on, I would leave it on. It does help with the overall image quality.
Here you can go Trapezoidal mode. If you want a biopsy line, you could push that down. It’s going to give you a warning just saying, hey, make sure that your biopsy guide is calibrated before you do this. Click OK and you have your biopsy line. Push down again to get rid of it. If you want a center line, the same thing. Push down and you’ve got your center line there.
Back over to here we have tissue harmonics. To exit this, first I’m going to hit the Exit. We have tissue harmonics, which is also for image optimization. You can learn more about that in the guide. It’s always good to try to see if it works or not. You often lose penetration when you have harmonics on but you gain resolution, so it’s always nice to try it out if you’re having trouble imaging and you want to get the best image possible. On linear probes at low frequencies sometimes it’s not as good.
Here we have AIO, which is automatic image optimization, which the machine will try and optimize the image based on what it’s looking at. So if you hit it, it’ll change the resolution a little bit. It’s always worth just to give it a try to see if you like what it does.
Over here we also have our zoom control. Right now it’s an angle, and that’s not going to do anything. If you want to zoom, you’re going to push the Zoom button down. You can use the trackball to scroll around what it is that you want to see. And you press the Zoom again to zoom in. And you can see here that this trackball scrolls around in that zoom area. Hit it again to get rid of it. To go back, you can hit Zoom. And you can also twist to increase or decrease you zoom area. Press it again, and here.
And this down here, this little cheat sheet says if you move the TB zoom box, means if you use the trackball, what you’re doing by moving the trackball is moving this zoom box around. So if I hit Exit, notice it just says B menu, which is this menu for B mode. And here we have our depth. Just simply twist it to change the depth to smaller or larger. And you have your depth marker down here. And it also shows up here, 2.5 centimeters. I scroll down, it’s 7.4. If I push it down, it will change the position of that focal zone along here, that little yellow arrow. And you’re going to want to place that to the area you would like the best resolution in your image.
And one other note in 2D, there’s a hidden feature here. If you push the Gain button down it will actually go to a full screen. So you lose all that information around the side and it will increase the size of your image to the full screen. So if I just hit Gain again, it takes me back to the smaller image.
