Assessment of the effects of direct myofascial release in the lateral gastrocnemius muscle of tennis athletes using ShearWave™ elastography.

Objectives: The purpose of the present study was to utilize ShearWave™ Elastography to assess tissue stiffness by measuring shear wave speed before and after applying the direct Myofascial release (MFR) technique to the lateral gastrocnemius muscle of competitive tennis athletes.

Methods: Shear wave speed values were measured in the regions of interest within the lateral gastrocnemius fascia and muscle areas from the elastographic images. Measurements were taken in three different situations: before, immediately after and 5 min after MFR protocol.

Influence of Low-Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound Parameters on the Bone Mineral Density in Rat Model: A Systematic Review.

Objective: Bone recovery typically depends on the age of organisms or the prevalence of metabolic disorders such as osteoporosis, which is a metabolic condition characterized by decreased bone strength and bone mineral density (BMD). Therefore, low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS), a non-invasive method for osteogenic stimulation, presents promising results. However, heterogeneity in animal study designs is a typical characteristic.

Parameter estimation in high-intensity focused ultrasound therapy.

Hyperthermia using High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is an acoustic therapy for cancer treatment. This technique consists of an increase in the temperature field of the tumor to achieve coagulative necrosis and immediate cell death. Therefore, for having a successful treatment, the physical problem requires to know several properties due to the high variability from individual to individual, or even for the same individual under different physiological conditions.

Superficial and deep lumbar multifidus layers of asymptomatic individuals: intraday and interday reliability of the echo intensity measurement.

Introduction: Ultrasonography has been used to understand the functional and biomechanical aspects of the lumbar multifidus muscle in vivo. To characterize the multifidus echogenicity, the peculiarities of their superficial and deep layers must be considered.

Purpose: The present paper aimed to characterize the lumbar multifidus echo intensity (EI), in both superficial and deep layers, in ultrasonography images acquired in longitudinal and transversal orientations.

Evaluating the performance of convolutional neural networks with direct acyclic graph architectures in automatic segmentation of breast lesion in US images.

Background: Outlining lesion contours in Ultra Sound (US) breast images is an important step in breast cancer diagnosis. Malignant lesions infiltrate the surrounding tissue, generating irregular contours, with spiculation and angulated margins, whereas benign lesions produce contours with a smooth outline and elliptical shape. In breast imaging, the majority of the existing publications in the literature focus on using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for segmentation and classification of lesions in mammographic images.

Texture Analysis Based on Auto-Mutual Information for Classifying Breast Lesions with Ultrasound.

Described here is a novel texture extraction method based on auto-mutual information (AMI) for classifying breast lesions. The objective is to extract discriminating information found in the non-linear relationship of textures in breast ultrasound (BUS) images. The AMI method performs three basic tasks: (i) it transforms the input image using the ranklet transform to handle intensity variations of BUS images acquired with distinct ultrasound scanners; (ii) it extracts the AMI-based texture features in the horizontal and vertical directions from each ranklet image; and (iii) it classifies the breast lesions into benign and malignant classes, in which a support-vector machine is used as the underlying classifier.

A computer-aided diagnosis system for breast ultrasound based on weighted BI-RADS classes.

Background And Objective: Conventional computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for breast ultrasound (BUS) are trained to classify pathological classes, that is, benign and malignant. However, from a clinical perspective, this kind of classification does not agree totally with radiologists' diagnoses. Usually, the tumors are assessed by using a BI-RADS (Breast Imaging-Reporting and Data System) category and, accordingly, a recommendation is emitted: annual study for category 2 (benign), six-month follow-up study for category 3 (probably benign), and biopsy for categories 4 and 5 (suspicious of malignancy).

Reliability of ultrasound texture measures of Biceps Brachialis and Gastrocnemius Lateralis muscles' images.

Ultrasound (US) is an important tool for diagnosing of many musculoskeletal tissue conditions. Image texture analysis can be used to characterize this tissue. The complexity curve (CC) is a technique commonly used to characterize the number of grey-level transitions in an image.

Computational evaluation of the compositional factors in fracture healing affecting ultrasound axial transmission measurements.

This work aimed at computationally evaluating the compositional factors in fracture healing affecting ultrasound axial transmission (UAT), using four numerical daily-changing healing models, representing more realistic clinical conditions. Using two-dimensional (2-D) simulations, a 1-MHz source and a receiver were positioned parallel to the bone surface to detect the first arriving signal (FAS). The time-of-flight of the FAS (TOF(FAS)) was found to be sensitive only to superficial modifications in the propagation path.