Contrast imaging has significantly improved clinical diagnosis by increasing the contrast-to-tissue ratio after microbubble injection. Pulse inversion imaging is the most commonly used contrast imaging technique because it greatly increases the contrast-to-tissue ratio by extracting microbubble nonlinearities. The main purpose of our study was to propose an automatic technique providing the best contrast- to-tissue ratio throughout the experiment. For reasons of simplicity, we proposed maximizing the contrast-to-tissue ratio with an appropriate choice of the transmit frequency. The contrast-to-tissue ratio was maximized by a closed-loop system including the pulse inversion technique. An algorithm based on gradient descent provided iterative determination of the optimal transmit frequency. The optimization method converged quickly after six iterations. This optimal control method is easy to implement and it optimizes the contrast-to-tissue ratio by adaptively selecting the transmit frequency.

International audienceIn utero, Monitoring of fetal wellbeing or suf-fering is today an open challenge, due to the high number of clinical parameters to be considered. An automatic mon-itoring of fetal activity, dedicated for quantifying fetal well-being, becomes necessary. For this purpose and in a view to supply an alternative for the Manning test, we used an ultrasound multitransducer muligate Doppler system. One important issue (and first step in our investigation) is the accurate estimation of fetal heart rate (FHR). An estima-tion of the FHR is obtained by evaluating the autocorrela-tion function of the Doppler signals for ills and healthiness foetus. However, this estimator is not enough robust since about 20% of FHR are not detected in comparison to a ref-erence system. These non detections are principally due to the fact that the Doppler signal generated by the fetal mov-ing is strongly disturbed by the presence of others several Doppler sources (mother' s moving, pseudo breathing, etc.). By modifying the existing method (autocorrelation method) and by proposing new time and frequency estimators used in the audio' s domain, we reduce to 5% the probability of non-detection of the fetal heart rate. These results are really encouraging and they enable us to plan the use of automatic classification techniques in order to discriminate between healthy and in suffering foetus

Characterizing fetal wellbeing with a Doppler ultrasound device requires computation of a score based on fetal parameters. In order to analyze the parameters derived from the fetal heart rate correctly, an accuracy of 0.25 beats per minute is needed. Simultaneously with the lowest false negative rate and the highest sensitivity, we investigated whether various Doppler techniques ensure this accuracy. We found that the accuracy was ensured if directional Doppler signals and autocorrelation estimation were used. Our best estimator provided sensitivity of 95.5%, corresponding to an improvement of 14% compared to the standard estimator.

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International Congress on Ultrasonics, Santiago de Chile, January 2009International audienceIntroduction: Since the introduction of ultrasound (US) contrast imaging, the imaging systems use a fixed emitting frequency. However it is known that the insonified medium is time-varying and therefore an adapted time-varying excitation is expected. We suggest an adaptive imaging technique which selects the optimal transmit frequency that maximizes the acoustic contrast. Two algorithms have been proposed to find an US excitation for which the frequency was optimal with microbubbles. Methods and Materials: Simulations were carried out for encapsulated microbubbles of 2 microns by considering the modified Rayleigh-Plesset equation for 2 MHz transmit frequency and for various pressure levels (20 kPa up to 420kPa). In vitro experiments were carried out using a transducer operating at 2 MHz and using a programmable waveform generator. Contrast agent was then injected into a small container filled with water. Results and discussions: We show through simulations and in vitro experiments that our adaptive imaging technique gives: 1) in case of simulations, a gain of acoustic contrast which can reach 9 dB compared to the traditional technique without optimization and 2) for in vitro experiments, a gain which can reach 18 dB. There is a non negligible discrepancy between simulations and experiments. These differences are certainly due to the fact that our simulations do not take into account the diffraction and nonlinear propagation effects. Further optimizations are underway

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International audienceThis paper deals with the discrimination between suffering foetuses and normal foetuses by means of a multi-scale similarity entropy. Sample entropy and similarity entropy are evaluated in multi-scale analysis on foetal heart rate signals. Without multi-scale analysis, our results show that only the similarity entropy differentiate suffering foetuses to normal foetuses. Furthermore with the multi-scale analysis, our results show that both the sample entropy and the similarity entropy can discriminate the distressed foetuses to normal foetuses. In all cases the similarity entropy outperforms the sample entropy that is encouraging for another biomedical applications

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