ABSTRACT
Ultrasound is sound with a frequency above the audible range of the human ear. In medical ultrasound scanners the frequency range is usually in the range of 1–15 MHz. Using an ultrasound transducer, sound pulses are transmitted into the body where they are reflected at various structures, for example, boundaries between different tissues, due to differences in acoustical properties. The raw ultrasound data, called Radio Frequency data, is an oscillating signal describing the sound pressure measured at the transducer face at a time corresponding to the depth where the echo is produced in the image. Additional files stored with the ultrasound images contain information about which transducer and which settings were used during the acquisition. This raw data can often be exported from medical imaging devices but different manufacturers and models may export in different file formats. In this chapter, we demonstrated how to read such data, convert it into images and display it in MATLAB.
