Fine Tuning the Flow

Determining the presence or absence of blood flow is an important part of many ultrasound examinations; including general, breast, musculoskeletal, and, of course, vascular exams. With appropriate adjustments, ultrasound can detect and display flow as well as or better than many other imaging modalities. Limitations are technologist dependent. In order to help sonographers improve their understanding of the tools that can be used to optimize flow we will discuss a variety of ways to enhance the use of ultrasound machines, and in turn deliver the best results for the radiologists and patients. This is a vast subject that has numerous branches of optimization applications and artifacts within each key element we will discuss. The authors would like this article to serve as a general baseline and troubleshooting tool to help sonographers improve flow detection by using the key optimization techniques in a variety of different cases.