Ultrasound discrimination capabilities?

strangerep

Hi all,

First time poster in this forum. (I usually hang out over in the quantum physics forum).

I'm hoping there's someone here who knows technical details of ultrasound imaging and associated diagnostic techniques.

More specifically, how good/bad is ultrasound imaging for discriminating between different tissues, etc. To make my question more concrete, suppose we have a patient with a hernia. Ultrasound imaging can clearly show the movement of (say) omental fat between layers of the abdomen. But what if it's not fat, but a blood clot (haematoma) that's moving around a bit when the patient strains?

Can the ultrasound image distinguish between the two, or is it essential to use more sophisticated diagnostics like CT or MRI ?

Cheers.