On the Echogenicity of Natural Starch-Based Blood Mimicking Fluids for Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound Imaging: Preliminary In-vitro Experiments

Natural starch-based blood-mimicking fluid (BMF) has been used as an alternative to commercially available BMFs for in-vitro Doppler investigations in low-resource settings. Most reported works in the literature have used corn starch-based BMF. Evaluation of other natural starches for potential BMF and their characterization have relatively been unexplored in the literature. To this end, this work investigates the echogenicity of corn-, potato-, tapioca-, and wheat starch-based BMFs prepared using a liquid base of pure water-glycerol mixture with three different starch concentrations (1%, 3%, and 5%). The experiments were performed by manually pumping the BMFs to a PolyVinyl alcohol (PVA) based flow phantom using a syringe and raw datasets were acquired using a Verasonics Vantage 128 Research Ultrasound System. Echogenicity was measured as the mean pixel intensity in a selected region of interest (ROI) in the beamformed image. Among the four natural starch-based BMFs, potato starch-based BMF showed the highest echogenicity and contrast with almost 13%, 14%, and 10% higher pixel intensities (dB) than that of the least echoic BMF with 1%, 3%, and 5% starch concentrations respectively. Moreover, the echogenicity of corn, tapioca, and wheat starch-based BMF was observed to be similar, and the results suggest that these BMFs with higher starch concentrations shall be employed for in-vitro contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging.