In medical ultrasound, there is a lack of effective methods for medical physicists and sonographers to evaluate the performance of this equipment. When doctors purchase equipment, they frequently compare imagers from different manufacturers “side-by-side” on the same patient. Our goals are to supplement – or replace – this cumbersome approach with objective tests. We are developing phantoms containing simulated, low-contrast “lesions,” representative of cancerous lesions, for example. We also are writing computer codes to digitize ultrasound images of the phantoms and analyze the images for detectability of masses [7], The phantoms and algorithms also will be used for routine quality assurance tests of ultrasound scanners.
