2D Imaging and Image Optimization on the Chison Q9 Ultrasound Machine: Training Part 2 of 7
Delve into the menus, interface and features of the Chison Q9.
This video training will give you the most insight into the various menus and hidden features of the Chison Q9 Portable shared service ultrasound machine.
This is one among many of our videos in our Ultrasound Machine Training library. Looking to buy a Chison ultrasound machine? Call one of our sales experts today at (877) 661-8224.
Links to all parts of the series can be found below the video.
https://providi.wistia.com/medias/3y7bgy138s?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640
Part 1: Chison Q9 System Introduction & Overview
Part 2: 2D Imaging & Optimization
Part 3: Doppler & M-Mode
Part 4: Measurements & Annotations
Part 5: Review & Save Images
Part 6: Exam Review & Export
Part 7: System Customization
Bonus Chapter: 4D Imaging on the Chison Q9
[split-test id=”rental-quote”]
Transcript to Chison Q9 Training Part 2: 2D Imaging and Optimization
So let’s get started in 2D imaging. To begin, we’re going to push the Patient button, these two people right here, get into the patient information screen. Now it automatically gives me a patient ID, but if I know I’ve already seen this patient before, I don’t want to enter any information just yet.
I’ll go to Archive, and from here, I could search by patient ID, their name, study type, and any sort of time span, certain dates. I can click there. Certain time span for where I want to look back. Or I can just look here, and they will populate here. So if I just type in a patient name, I can click Search, and then there it is right there. And there we go.
But since I do want to start a new patient and a new exam, I’m going to hit Cancel, and it’s going to take you back to the main imaging screen. So I’ll have to hit this patient information again. So if you think you’ve seen that patient before, make sure you go to Archive first because if you enter this information in, it will erase it as soon as you hit Cancel on that screen. So we’ll go ahead and get this patient started. From here, I’m going to select the type of exam I’m going to do.
Now this slightly differs from what your imaging presets will be, and I’ll show you what that means in just a minute. But this is what’s going to go on the report showing you what kind of examine it is that you did.
And here, you’re going to enter any information that refers to that study that you would like to add, including comments, and this will also show up on your report. If we use Worklist here, that is for DICOM Worklist. If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t have it, so I wouldn’t be concerned with that.
An IT professional would set that up in the DICOM menus, which is shown in the system set-up guide in this video. So I have a couple things down here. New Patient, well, I’ve already added a new patient, so you don’t want to click that, unless you’re on this screen and like to start over. New Study, if you pull up Archive and you go to this patient information, you would start a new study under that patient name. And since I’m starting a new exam with a new patient altogether, I’m going to go ahead and click OK.
And here, I have my patient name, patient ID, and then everything else about the machine here. So by default, this probe comes up to a carotid measurement. Let’s go ahead and pretend we’re starting a new examine. And here’s all the exams that are available. If I had another probe here, I would select in this window here. It would show the name of that probe.
Right now, I’m using this once, so I’d hit Enter to select that. I’d choose the study. Notice these are slightly different than what you saw on the patient information screen. So you just want to be as close as possible. These are all imaging presets that refer to the calculations and not necessarily anything to do with the reports. So we’ll just hit Vascular, and we’ll go ahead and hit Carotid.
But any time you click on something different, these presets will show differently. So your overall application will be how it shows your calculation package. And then your preset is your imaging preset for optimized image quality for whatever it is that you’re looking at. Down below, you have some user define presets, where you can create your own presets, where you can select those in the future.
We’ll show you how to do that later on. So I’m going to go ahead and select this. I need to double click on it, and it will take me to the imaging screen. Now we reviewed some of these controls in the earlier movie, and in just a minute, we’ll get to more about what they do. But we didn’t get to some of these controls in the soft keys and exactly what it is that they do. In B-Mode, there’s two hard keys that you’re going to want to know about.
It’s the focus control, where you can change the focus position, and depth, where you can change the depth. So you’ll see these arrows here refer to the focal position. Depth– change this, shows the depth of the image, 4.93 centimeters, means the very bottom of the image is at 4.93 centimeters. This particular probe goes all the way down to 9.86 centimeters.
Up top, we have our frequency. These are all image optimization controls. We have our frequency. And in order to change that, as we showed earlier, we’re going to push that down, and it’s going to change the value. And you’ll see the value change up top here.
If we twist it, it changes the value of the lower menu. Same thing here, focus number, your focal position, compound imaging. If you’re not aware of what compound imaging is, we have some things on our blog at Providian that show you the image optimization technologies and what you can do to optimize your image.
And they discuss all of these things, such as the tissue harmonics, compound imaging, speckled reduction, and all those things that you’ll find in ultrasound today. So discussing these is beyond what we’ll be taught here. So follow the link onscreen, and you’ll see the best way to go about learning about the image optimization.
iImage is an automatic image optimization where, if you twist this here, it’s going to change. And it will change some parameters about the image to help improve image quality for you by evaluating the image and trying to improve from there. Persistence– this is frame averaging, but you could change that here.
You’ll see up here, there’s one grayed out called SRA On. That’s the Speckle Reduction Imaging, and when compound imaging is on, you’re not able to turn that off. Go back to the compound imaging, turn it off, and then, you’re able to turn the Sparkle Reduction on or off. Line density, you’ve got your choice between high and low.
And noise rejection– twist that knob, and you can get to that level there. Now there’s another set of image optimization tools that aren’t shown onscreen here. And those are found by pressing down this Menu button. This menu changes whether you’re in a frozen or live state. In the live state, we get these options here. And we use the Menu button to be able to change where it’s set.
Scan width, we’ll push down and then twist this to change it. And you can see it changes the width of the scanner head and how much you’re going to do. The reason you would change this is to get a smaller viewing area and to improve your overall frame rate. Click it again. Image Rotate, we can hit this and flip it 90, 180 degrees, similar to what these buttons do here.
Gamma is going to be your overall image brightness. You can see the grayscale. Smoothing works like an image optimization. Edge Enhance is another image optimization feature. Acoustic Power, we don’t recommend you playing with this. This is set at the factory. Trapezoidal Mode– turn on Trapezoidal Mode, and it’ll give you a wider image at the bottom of the screen so it’s more like a trapezoid.
Your biopsy– take you to the Biopsy menu. You’re going to have this line here to show that. When I want to get rid of it, scroll down to Biopsy again, hit it again. Super Needle is image optimization to visualize a needle. So if you’re doing any needle-guided injections, this will help it glow. And it’ll work very much like the biopsy, where you’re going to take your needle and make it perpendicular to this line.
This is showing the scan lines. It’s going to make your needle really glow when you turn that on. From that, you can also go, Change Your Needle Angle, so you can make sure you can get it perpendicular a little more easily. Here, you’ll turn on your elastography. Turn this off. 2D steer. Exterior image. You can see it looks this way and that way. So you can get an image that way, similar to what the trapezoidal does, but you get a wider steering angle. Elastography. Brightness is your overall screen brightness.
This is something you’ll want to set according to what your room’s like. Now if I have the ECG, these are different controls for the ECG. You would use this in the same way. We have our utility where we can get to our post-processing color maps. It says Color Sample, but these are the gray maps, where you can change the gray maps. And here’s your chroma. We can change that as well.
Click Exit. Now the rest are really things that you probably aren’t going to use at all. Hardware detecting requires a password. Slide Show shows some images in demo. Go ahead and click Exit. How I got to that again was I went down and clicked on this B menu, went down to Utility, pushed down Utility. If I wanted to get to those others, I can go to that post-processing and get to the color maps.
Now going back over to dual and quad modes, let’s take a look at these. We saw this up-down before. I’m going to grab the probe here and put some gel on it. So now, we can get an image onscreen so you can see what it’s doing live. When I want to get a second image and make a comparison, we’ll hit this again. And then, second one’s going to go live.
And so when I want to get the side by side, I can flip this back and forth this way. And you’ll see the yellow bar above the live image here. If I want to freeze them both, I hit Freeze, and I can take my measurements from there. And we’ll get to the measurements later on. And when I want to go back to the 2D mode, I’m going to use this little Scan button here. It takes me back to the standard 2D imaging mode.
Quad mode works very much the same way. I’m going to hit it, keep pressing it, and so I get my live view images. And when I go to Measurements Or Calculations, I could take my measurements on each one of those images. I freeze, and I’ve got that stopped. And once last item of note. We showed all the different parameters for changing your image.
If you made all those changes and you didn’t like what you did, you can always go back to this Exam Preset. Go to the Probe button, double click on the exam that you did. And anything you made the changes down here between frequency, dynamic range, focus number, the compound imaging, the speckle reduction. And you feel like you really messed up the image and you want to go back, you can go back and reselect that. And it’s going to reset that all to the defaults where it was originally, where you started.
