Detecting Uniformity Artifacts in Ultrasound Transducers: Insights from Clinical Median Images and Deep Learning for...

Uniformity artifacts caused by defective transducer elements or scanner malfunctions degrade diagnostic image quality. Traditional quality control (QC) methods, such as phantom testing and visual or quantitative image analysis, can be labor-intensive and limited in test frequency. This study aims to develop a deep learning framework to detect uniformity artifacts and complement traditional QC.

Clinical median images were generated by aggregating co-registered grayscale ultrasound images acquired by each transducer and computing median intensity values across the image stack. A pretrained ResNet-18 model was fine-tuned on a dataset consisting of clinical median images from linear and curvilinear transducers. The dataset was divided into training, validation, and testing subsets, ensuring no overlap between training and test transducers. To assess generalizability, the model was also evaluated on an independent test set of 396 phantom-validated images from linear and curvilinear transducers.

The model achieved 100% accuracy on the first dataset's test set. On the independent test set, it attained 87.4% accuracy with high sensitivity (0.84) and specificity (0.88), demonstrating robust generalization. Occlusion sensitivity maps confirmed the model's attention to uniformity artifact regions.

The deep learning framework using clinical median images demonstrated robust performance across several linear and curvilinear transducer models. It could be integrated into the clinical QC workflow by automating artifact detection in an effective and timely manner. In our practice, it can flag median images classified as artifact-present, reducing human review time by approximately 80% while preserving detection accuracy.