Processing equipment for two-dimensional echocardiographic data

The multiscan principle has been shown to be an important diagnostic technique in echocardiology. Since the direct visualization of moving cross-sections of the heart reveals considerably more information than can be immediately digested, it is foreseen that automation in acquisition, processing and display of the clinical information should result in further simplification of diagnostic routine. This paper describes the development of the processing equipment for ultrasonic data from a multi-element system and illustrates early results in digital process of this data.In the development of computer aided quantitative analysis, direct storage of the multi-element pictures is the only way to avoid major loss of information. The method employs a PDP-11 EI0 computer (16 K words). Real time recording of the moving images on a digital disk utilizes direct memory access. It offers the possibility to store 50 digitized pictures/sec with sixteen intensity levels. This requires a bit rate of 1 Mbit/sec for the system. With the 1,2 megaword (16 bit) disk a maximum storage capacity of 20 sec of multiscan data results. The rectangular display format of the multiscan is well suited for direct conversion to video. With this system image processing and clinical programming are now in progress.