Sui Apogee 2300

• Super high resolution transducer technology, displayed on a crystal clear 15″ monitor. Full screen mode at the touch of a button, and HDMI port for displaying on even larger monitors.

• Colour and Pulsed Wave Doppler, for visualising and quantifying blood flow – for example, through the umbilical cord of foetal heart.

• Continuous record mode – no more freezing and saving.

TECHNICAL FEATURES

Manufacturers and their distributors love to bombard people with meaningless jargon. We’ve picked out a few of the most important technologies of this machine, and translated them for you below.

• XBeam: This is SIUI’s proprietary term for compound imaging. Compound imaging simply means using electronic beamforming – only possible in the most advanced transducers – to send several bursts of ultrasound, all from slightly different angles. The object of interest (the foetus, for example) will be present from every angle: it is really there, after all! Ultrasounds artefacts, however – the ‘noise’ that makes poorer quality machines cloudy and their imaging ambiguous – are not real structures, and will not be visible from every angle.

  The ultrasound machine will sum (or compound) these frames together. Structures that are really there will add together and reinforce; artefacts will cancel out. It is this amazing technology that gives the Apogee 2300 its breathtaking image quality.

• Nanoview: Sophisticated algorithms calculate which pixels belong to the edge of a structure, and then apply contrast enhancement and smoothing to accentuate its borders. This same technology can help to pick out the smallest of lesions and the earliest of gestation sacs.

• Fusion THI: One of the most modern incarnations of tissue harmonic imaging, fusion THI involves summing of the first and second harmonics. This not only delivers all of the normal benefits of THI (higher resolution images without loss of penetration), but also results in the elimination of artefacts, because if a structure is present in one harmonic but not the other, it is not a real reflector.