Quality Control of Real - Time Medical Ultrasound Equipment

Ultrasonic imaging is one of the most important, developing diagnostic tools today used by a diverse professional cohort, for a wide range of clinical applications and contexts. For more than 40 years, medical ultrasound imaging has been largely used by sonographers and doctors, in varies disciplines such as radiology, obstetrics and gynecology, vascular surgery and cardiology. Recently, the clinical application of medical ultrasound in the health and education contexts has grown. For example, rheumatologists, instead of simply relying on palpation of anatomy, use ultrasound imaging to guide targeted injections into bursa, joints and tendons . Quality Control (QC) is part of a Quality Assurance (QA) protocol that has become of primary interest in hospitals, in particular in those where (ISO) certification has been introduced. In QA, there are two levels can be distinguished: (a) testing of technical specifications of the equipment, and (b) testing of the performance from the user's point of view. In case of medical ultrasound, the latter may be summarized by ''imaging performance'' .