Chison Q9 Saving and Reviewing Images: Ultrasound Machine Training Part 5

November 21, 2014 by Brian Gill

Chison Q9 Saving and Reviewing Images: Training Part 5 of 7

There are a few important things to know about saving images on the Q9, as it has an option that is rare on ultrasound machines.

Part 5 will teach you about saving images, clips and portions of clips, as well as how to use the cine review and clipboard features of the Chison Q9 portable shared service ultrasound machine.

This is one among many of our videos in our Ultrasound Machine Training library. Looking to buy a Chison ultrasound machine? Call one of our sales experts today at (877) 661-8224.

Links to all parts of the series can be found below the video. Links will be updated as the videos are posted.

Part 1: Chison Q9 System Introduction & Overview
Part 2: 2D Imaging & Optimization
Part 3: Doppler & M-Mode
Part 4: Measurements & Annotations
Part 5: Review & Save Images
Part 6: Exam Review & Export
Part 7: System Customization
Bonus Chapter: 4D Imaging on the Chison Q9

Transcript to Saving and Reviewing Images on the Chison Q9 training series:

Now to save images from a live image, you’re going to want to hit Freeze. And this says TB Cine Loop.

This means if I use the trackball, I can scroll back through in Cine Loop mode. It’s going to remember the last– this shows 512 images– it’s going to show me the last bit of images that were saved on that. So when I unfreeze, and I just get something really quick, and I like what I see, I’ll hit freeze. And there were 34 frames that it saved.

And if that’s the one I wanted to do, I could scroll right back to that. If I wanted to see the whole thing, I could click the Play Pause, and it’s going to play it over and over again. I could change the play speed by twisting this here. If I only want to see a portion of it, I could scroll to it and hit Set Start Position, scroll to the end, and click Set End Position.

Now if I play that, it’s only showing a sort section. The reason I would want to do this is, let’s say it’s one heartbeat cycle, and I don’t want to show– if there’s 512 frames there, I don’t want to show my radiologist that whole long section. I only want to show them one or two cycles. I’ll set my start and end position. Now we’ll only show those two cycles that you would want the radiologist to see.

This also saves a lot of hard drive. If you’re going to be saving this kind of a clip to your hard drive and you have a very, very long Cine loop, it’s going to take a long time to, a, save it, b, to convert it, and d, it’s going to eat up your hard drive space very quickly. You’ll see this little bar go up. And at one point, you’re going to start cleaning up that hard drive space. You can click Reset Range, it goes back to the whole thing. We go back to a live image again here. I’ll do it a little bit longer here. Freeze the image.

This is 115 frames. It’s a little bit longer. And how many frames it has depends on your current frame rate. This shows 31 frames per second. So I took almost four seconds right there of this clip. So how many seconds are actually saved are more dependent on how many frames per second you have. Because in certain situations you might have an extremely high frame rate, whereas in other situations, you might have a very low frame rate.

So when it’s saving frame by frame, you might have a very, very long section or a very, very short section. It completely depends on how many frames per second your machine is set at. That frame rate adjustment is made through things like line density or your scan width and some other parameters. So let’s say I wanted to find that image that I just saw that I like and that’s something I want to save. To save a single image, you just save that frame. I’m going to hit this Save button. And here I have one on the clipboard here. If I want to store this entire clip– let’s say I just want to choose a certain section of that clip– set my end position.

I’m going to hold down this. It looks like a film strip. Going to go ahead and push that. And now it’s got a little reel that looks like an old school film reel up in the top righthand corner saying that you have a Cine loop saved there and that is a live video. Now if I want to view those, I’m going to hit this arrow key. See how I can go through these and select them.

I can go to hit Enter, and I can review that clip. Go here and review the static image here and review the clip. If I like what I see, I can hit Unfreeze and I’m back to live imaging mode. Now there’s one unique function about this that’s not always available on others. It’s you have all of our Cine loops and everything has been saved in retro.

Now if I want to see forward– let’s say I see this, and I don’t want to freeze and go back, and I want to save the next few seconds of this video– I can hit this clip and it’s saving a live image right here. And it’s going to save for a set amount of time that’s in the system settings or I could manually do it much like I would have done with the VCR. So now I can just keep going.

I never had to stop imaging. I want to save this again. I’m going to hit that. And I’ve got it set just to save a certain amount. And how long it’s saved is in the System Setup menu, which we’ll get to later. So I just keep scanning, and I never have to stop and scroll through, just cine save. I can hit that again. If I want it to be shorter, Start Stop, Start Stop. Much like you would do with a VCR.

Now there’s also a fast save feature here. If I hit this arrow button, I go to select something, I can click the Update key and it will turn green. And a little menu popped up here. If I click on this, if I have a USB or DICOM-enabled, I can immediately store those to a USB or send them on a DICOM network without having to go through that section later in how to export images to DICOM or USB.

So this just allows you for a quick transmission or export. Oh, and there is one more. If I want to delete those, I can click Enter, and those two are gone. So this is a quick way to just say, I don’t like that. I can delete it. Or I just want to quickly send this one off to the DICOM server. Hit that. Click DICOM. Since I don’t have anything set up, it’s not going to work. And I click Update again to reselect or deselect any of those images.