Echocardiogram Programming Fundamentals 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What does increasing the overall gain on an echocardiography machine primarily affect?
- Transducer frequency
- Brightness of all returning echoes (Correct answer)
- Pulse repetition frequency
- Depth of penetration
Correct answer: Brightness of all returning echoes
Overall gain amplifies all returning echo signals, increasing the brightness of the entire image uniformly.
Question 2: Which parameter should be adjusted to reduce near-field artifacts caused by excessive gain near the transducer?
- Harmonic imaging
- Time gain compensation (TGC) near-field sliders (Correct answer)
- Pulse repetition frequency
- Color Doppler scale
Correct answer: Time gain compensation (TGC) near-field sliders
TGC near-field sliders selectively reduce amplification of echoes returning from shallow depths, minimizing near-field clutter.
Question 3: When imaging a patient with poor acoustic windows, which machine setting can improve endocardial border definition?
- Increase imaging depth
- Activate tissue harmonic imaging (Correct answer)
- Decrease transducer frequency
- Reduce line density
Correct answer: Activate tissue harmonic imaging
Tissue harmonic imaging uses second-harmonic frequencies to reduce clutter and artifact, improving border definition in difficult windows.
Question 4: What is the primary effect of reducing imaging depth on a 2D echocardiogram?
- Decreased temporal resolution
- Increased frame rate (Correct answer)
- Lower spatial resolution
- Wider sector angle
Correct answer: Increased frame rate
Reducing depth shortens the time needed for each pulse to return, allowing more frames per second and thus higher temporal resolution.
Question 5: A sonographer notices aliasing in a pulsed-wave Doppler tracing. Which adjustment will most directly resolve this?
- Decrease sample volume size
- Lower the Nyquist limit by reducing scale
- Increase the scale (velocity range) (Correct answer)
- Switch to M-mode
Correct answer: Increase the scale (velocity range)
Increasing the Doppler velocity scale raises the Nyquist limit, allowing higher velocities to be displayed without aliasing.
Question 6: Which color Doppler parameter adjustment will best reduce color noise (speckle) in a low-velocity region?
- Increase color gain
- Decrease color gain (Correct answer)
- Widen the color box
- Increase PRF
Correct answer: Decrease color gain
Decreasing color gain reduces random noise signals that appear as scattered color pixels in regions without significant flow.
Question 7: On a standard echocardiography system, what does activating 'persistence' (frame averaging) accomplish?
- Increases spatial resolution by doubling scan lines
- Smooths the image by averaging multiple consecutive frames (Correct answer)
- Doubles the pulse repetition frequency
- Reduces harmonic artifacts
Correct answer: Smooths the image by averaging multiple consecutive frames
Persistence blends successive frames together, reducing temporal noise at the cost of some temporal resolution.
Echocardiogram Programming Fundamentals 2
What does increasing the overall gain on an echocardiography machine primarily affect?