Ultrasound Phantoms to Protect Patients from Novices

Ultrasound Phantoms to Protect Patients from Novices

With the growing use of ultrasound for pain management, we are interested in how to teach and practice ultrasound-guided procedures. Ethically, we should not insert a needle in a patient until after much practice on a phantom. Several types of phantoms have been introduced for ultrasound training, including water, agar/gelatin, elastomeric rubber, and meat phantoms and cadavers. The ideal phant...

Taking steps to protect patients from specimen-handling errors.

Teaching ultrasound procedural skills-low cost phantoms and animal models.

Acquiring the necessary cognitive and psychomotor skills to perform ultrasound guided procedures may require initial training. Growing evidence shows that simulation can help in the acquisition of procedural skills. Commercially available phantoms are expensive, have non-tissue like haptics, are preformed with fixed targets and do not allow for additional targets to be imbedded. In this study w...

Ultrasound-Induced Bubble Clusters in Tissue-Mimicking Agar Phantoms.

Therapeutic ultrasound can drive bubble activity that damages soft tissues. To study the potential mechanisms of such injury, transparent agar tissue-mimicking phantoms were subjected to multiple pressure wave bursts of the kind being considered specifically for burst wave lithotripsy. A high-speed camera recorded bubble activity during each pulse. Various agar concentrations were used to alter...

Novel tissue mimicking materials for high frequency breast ultrasound phantoms.

The development and acoustical characterisation of a range of novel agar-based tissue mimicking material (TMMs) for use in clinically relevant, quality assurance (QA) and anthropomorphic breast phantoms are presented. The novel agar-based TMMs described in this study are based on a comprehensive, systematic variation of the ingredients in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) TMM....