Common Ultrasound Artifacts
Shadowing
Appearance: A region of hypo-intense signal often distal to high attenuation objects, such as bone.
Cause: Attenuation by objects superficial to the artifact.
Enhancement
Appearance: A region of hyper-intense signal often distal to low attenuation objects, such as uniform fluid-filled cavities.
Cause: Lack of attenuation by objects superficial to the artifact.
Reverberation
Appearance: Hyper-intense repeating signal.
Cause: Repeated reflections between two closely spaced objects.
Mis-mapping
Appearance: The image displays an incorrect location of an object.
Cause: Refraction due to variations in the speed of sound at the interface of the tissues causes displacement of the returning echoes.
Side-lobe energy emission
Appearance: Often manifests itself as an apparent signal which disappears when the transducer orientation is rotated.
Cause: Anatomy outside of the beam is mapped into the main beam.
Speed Artifact
Appearance: Abrupt mis-mapping of an object along the direction of the beam axis.
Cause: Variations of the speed of sound between beam projections.
Mirroring
Appearance: A second inverted object appears beyond a highly reflective surface.
Cause: Multiple beam reflections between the object and the highly reflective surface.
Twinkling Artifact
Appearance: In color Doppler imaging mode, a region appears as a rapidly changing mix of colors.
Cause: The presence of small strongly reflective objects within the Doppler study.
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