Questions on Echocardiography technique and interpretation

Posted on 31. Jul, 2008 by admin in Technical Q&A

What is difference between gain and compress in echocardiography and How to improve the visuality of myocardium in stress echocardiography .

One of our readers just sent us this question and I would like to put this out to the professional Echocardiographer community.  Your assistance for a fellow Echo Tech is welcome!

Tags: ,

One Response to “Questions on Echocardiography technique and interpretation”

  1. kevin

    26. Jan, 2010

    Boring old physics time I’m afraid. Gain has two types, overall and Timed gain compression or TGC. Firstly the difference is that gain use amplifies the sent and received ultrasound signal to pull the 2D image up into a black / white interface on the monitor screen ; compression takes that data and “squeezes” it to increase or decrease the greyness of the white areas (myocardium).
    In most cases, good manipulation of gain controls – both overall and TGC should enhance the interface between the endocardium and the ventricular cavity sufficiently for a modified Simpson’s biplane EF% trace and likewise for stress imaging. In difficult cases, picking the best harmonic frequency setting for the Patient and then manipulation of the compression (usually decreasing compression) will almost always define the endocardium better. Please also remember that many of the most modern machines don’t even have a knob to perform this as they automatically decide best harmonic, compress and persist settings anyway. Hope this helps :-)

Leave a Reply