Kavli Affiliate: Biao Huang
| Authors: Biao Huang, Jipeng Yan, Megan Morris, Victoria Sinnett, Navita Somaiah, Meng-Xing Tang
| Summary:
Super-resolution ultrasound can image microvascular structure and flow at
sub-wave-diffraction resolution based on localising and tracking microbubbles.
Currently, tracking microbubbles accurately under limited imaging frame rates
and high microbubble concentrations remains a challenge, especially under the
effect of cardiac pulsatility and in highly curved vessels. In this study, an
acceleration-incorporated microbubble motion model is introduced into a Kalman
tracking framework. The tracking performance was evaluated using simulated
microvasculature with different microbubble motion parameters and acquisition
frame rates, and in vivo human breast tumour ultrasound datasets. The
simulation results show that the acceleration-based method outperformed the
non-acceleration-based method at different levels of acceleration and
acquisition frame rates and achieved significant improvement in true positive
rate (up to 10.03%), false negative rate (up to 28.61%) and correctly pairing
fraction (up to 170.14%). The proposed method can also reduce errors in
vasculature reconstruction via the acceleration-based nonlinear interpolation,
compared with linear interpolation (up to 19 um). The tracking results from
temporally downsampled low frame rate in vivo datasets from human breast
tumours show that the proposed method has better microbubble tracking
performance than the baseline method, if using results from the initial high
frame data as reference. Finally, the acceleration estimated from tracking
results also provides a spatial speed gradient map that may contain extra
valuable diagnostic information.
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