TY - GEN
T1 - Three-dimensional Super-Resolution Ultrasound Microvessel Imaging with Bipartite Graph-based Microbubble Tracking using a Verasonics 256-channel Ultrasound System
AU - Lok, U. Wai
AU - Huang, Chengwu
AU - Tang, Shanshan
AU - Gong, Ping
AU - Lucien, Fabrice
AU - Kim, Yohan
AU - Song, Pengfei
AU - Chen, Shigao
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/10
Y1 - 2019/10
N2 - Three-dimensional (3-D) super-resolution ultrasound microvessel imaging (SR-UMI) has been recently proposed to visualize 3-D microvasculature by overcoming the diffraction limited resolution in three spatial dimensions. However, 3-D SR-UMI suffers from high system complexity and sophisticated microbubble tracking mechanisms to account for 3D movement. To reduce the system complexity, methods such as row-column matrix, sparse array and micro-beamforming have been proposed to reduce the number of transmit/receive channel at the cost of degradation of image quality. In this study, a sub-aperture process is used to reduce the required received channel counts at the cost of slightly reducing the overall frame rate. For the microbubble tracking, two dimensional (2-D) bipartite graph-based tracking has been proposed to improve microbubble tracking performance for 2-D SR-UMI. This approach can reduce the background noise, improve the performance of super-resolution image, and stabilize the estimated micro-vessel flow speed. We extended the 2-D bipartite graph-based method to 3-D SR-UMI to reduce background noise and to improve the micro-bubble tracking performance. In this study, a flow channel phantom was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results showed that the proposed method can effectively improve the spatial resolution as compared with 3-D Power Doppler images.
AB - Three-dimensional (3-D) super-resolution ultrasound microvessel imaging (SR-UMI) has been recently proposed to visualize 3-D microvasculature by overcoming the diffraction limited resolution in three spatial dimensions. However, 3-D SR-UMI suffers from high system complexity and sophisticated microbubble tracking mechanisms to account for 3D movement. To reduce the system complexity, methods such as row-column matrix, sparse array and micro-beamforming have been proposed to reduce the number of transmit/receive channel at the cost of degradation of image quality. In this study, a sub-aperture process is used to reduce the required received channel counts at the cost of slightly reducing the overall frame rate. For the microbubble tracking, two dimensional (2-D) bipartite graph-based tracking has been proposed to improve microbubble tracking performance for 2-D SR-UMI. This approach can reduce the background noise, improve the performance of super-resolution image, and stabilize the estimated micro-vessel flow speed. We extended the 2-D bipartite graph-based method to 3-D SR-UMI to reduce background noise and to improve the micro-bubble tracking performance. In this study, a flow channel phantom was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results showed that the proposed method can effectively improve the spatial resolution as compared with 3-D Power Doppler images.
KW - 3-D bipartite graph-based method
KW - Super-resolution ultrasound microvessel imaging
KW - compensation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85077632763&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85077632763&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ULTSYM.2019.8925908
DO - 10.1109/ULTSYM.2019.8925908
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85077632763
T3 - IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS
SP - 1111
EP - 1113
BT - 2019 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS 2019
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 2019 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS 2019
Y2 - 6 October 2019 through 9 October 2019
ER -