🧱 The Ultrasound Display
The Ultrasonic Display is a large, approximately square region of the screen that shows an ultrasound image. By default it has a black background with ultrasound reflections shown in white. If you cannot see it in AAA, you might be in a Task-Window that doesn't show this display.
- If you don't have a recording loaded, then the display shows live data from your ultrasound probe.
- If you don't have a recording loaded and you don't have an ultrasound probe plugged in, then the display shows a blank rectangle.
- If you have a recording loaded, then the display shows a the currently selected time-point in the recording.
- If you have a recording loaded but the recording was made without an ultrasound probe plugged in, then the display shows a blank rectangle.
Appearance and functions associated with the ultrasonic display are accessed via a 
right-click popup menu. It looks very slightly different depending on whether a recording is loaded or it is in live mode ready to record. In live mode the Mean Image and Optical flow settings are not present.
The ultrasonic image can be controlled to adjust the brightness and contrast, elements such as splines, fan grids or the ultrasound image itself can be made visible or invisible and background colour can be changed to suit publication requirements
The Edit Splines dialog allows the colour, boldness and visibility of individual splines to be controlled.
The background colour can be changed using the Display Options sub-dialog.
The Interpolate scanlines (default) option can be switched off to view the scanlines that are interpolated to fill the gaps in between. It is representative of the raw data from which the image is created.
The Show raw ultrasonic display option shows a floating display of the raw scanline data before it is fanned out.
The Draw ultrasound faster option only affects the live display and is explained in the section on recording data.
The Brightness and contrast controls adjust the image appearance. They change the image that is sent to DeepLabCut and so the settings can have an effect on the accuracy of the spline contour estimation. Medium values for Brightness, Contrast and Enhance Contrast are recommended. As is a low Rejection value. Enhance Contrast shifts the contrast to apply to the region near to or far from the probe surface.
The above image shows high contrast and rejection. These settings are not recommended due to a loss of information in the image.
The Apply Dynamic Resolution function is not recommended for most AAA users. It was introduced as a means to speed up drawing and live spline fitting on low-end computers, but it has an undesireable effect on image scaling.
The Filter tab offers a range of image filtering techniques. They were introduced to provide options for reducing speckle and creating a subjectively more pleasing image. However we recommend not using any of the options for analysing data with the exception of Use dithering to anti-alias which improves the interpolation of the raw data. All of the other filters distort the image data and, as with the brightness and contrast controls, they will affect the performance of DeepLabCut.
The above application of smoothing reduces speckle but spreads pixels and can reduce DeepLabCut accuracy.
The image submenu allows the ultrasound image to be zoomed in or zoomed out.
Image limited to input resolution (Fit to window) limits the image so that the image is never stretched to fill the display window. Checking this setting, the image is shrunk to fit the window or if the window is larger than the image, it will be padded with white space. If the option is unchecked then the image can be stretched beyond its true size to fill the window. In practice, Micro ultrasound images have around 900 pixels per scanline and so will nearly always fill the window without stretching the image. i.e. the image is nearly always shrunk to fit the display window.
- Each time Zoom In is clicked the image will zoom in by 20%.
- Each time Zoom Out is clicked the image will zoom out by 20%.
- No Zoom resets the image to unzoomed standard view.
Once zoomed in, select Move Image then click and drag on the image to change the part that is visible. It only activates one-shot click and drag. Click on Move Image again if further adjustment is required.
Zoom will remain set while a recording is being analysed but defaults back to un-zoomed when a new recording is selected. If a different behaviour is preferred, please contact Articulate Instruments and we can adjust.
Rotate and Rotate video… currently do not do anything. Please contact Articulate Instruments if this function is desired.
The Mean Image option was intended to provide an averaged ultrasound image for the selected region but has not been implemented. Please contact Articulate Instruments if this function is desired.
See here for information on Optical Flow.
This function copies the visible ultrasonic or camera video image as it appears on screen at the screen resolution and places it on the clipboard. For a higher resolution, use the grab bars to enlarge the footprint of the ultrasonic/video window within the task window, then click copy bitmap. To copy into a document or slideshow simply click paste.
