Abstract:High-frame-rate imaging with a clutter filter can clearly visualize blood flow signals and provide more efficient discrimination with tissue signals. In vitro studies using clutter-less phantom and high-frequency ultrasound suggested a possibility of evaluating the red blood cell (RBC) aggregation by analyzing the frequency dependence of the backscatter coefficient (BSC). However, in in vivo applications, clutter filtering is required to visualize echoes from the RBC. This study initially evaluated the effect … Show more
“…25) The SVD-based clutter filter is currently used in various applications. [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] To apply a clutter filter to the received echo signals, echo signals obtained from at least six to eight Tx-Rx events are required, and a dataset processed by a clutter filter should be sampled regularly. Therefore, in conventional color flow imaging, ultrasonic pulses are repeatedly transmitted in the same direction or scan line, forming what is known as a packet, as depicted in Fig.…”
The frame rate in ultrasonography is significantly better than those in other medical imaging modalities, such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), even under a traditional imaging scheme, i.e., line-by-line scanning with a focused transmit beam. However, a higher frame rate would provide more possibilities in measurements of rapidly altering phenomena, such as cardiovascular dynamics. High-frame-rate imaging with unfocused transmit beams, such as plane and diverging transmit beams, enables an extremely high frame rate of over several thousand frames per second and has shown to be effective for cardiovascular applications including blood flow imaging. Although an extremely high temporal resolution is achieved by the high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging, conventional methods for blood flow imaging suffer from a limitation, i.e., a velocity component only in the direction of ultrasonic propagation is measured. In this article, recent developments in angle-independent blood flow imaging with high-frame-rate ultrasound are discussed.
“…25) The SVD-based clutter filter is currently used in various applications. [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] To apply a clutter filter to the received echo signals, echo signals obtained from at least six to eight Tx-Rx events are required, and a dataset processed by a clutter filter should be sampled regularly. Therefore, in conventional color flow imaging, ultrasonic pulses are repeatedly transmitted in the same direction or scan line, forming what is known as a packet, as depicted in Fig.…”
The frame rate in ultrasonography is significantly better than those in other medical imaging modalities, such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), even under a traditional imaging scheme, i.e., line-by-line scanning with a focused transmit beam. However, a higher frame rate would provide more possibilities in measurements of rapidly altering phenomena, such as cardiovascular dynamics. High-frame-rate imaging with unfocused transmit beams, such as plane and diverging transmit beams, enables an extremely high frame rate of over several thousand frames per second and has shown to be effective for cardiovascular applications including blood flow imaging. Although an extremely high temporal resolution is achieved by the high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging, conventional methods for blood flow imaging suffer from a limitation, i.e., a velocity component only in the direction of ultrasonic propagation is measured. In this article, recent developments in angle-independent blood flow imaging with high-frame-rate ultrasound are discussed.
“…Previous studies have developed in ultrasonic cardiovascular characterization such as vector flow [2][3][4] wall shear stress [5][6][7] wall roughness 8,9) wall displacement 10,11) and red blood cell (RBC) aggregation. [12][13][14] In cardiovascular ultrasound imaging, weak blood flow echo is obscured by clutter components from blood vessel walls and surrounding tissues, which are seen as stationary signals. In such cases, the blood flow echo can be enhanced by applying a clutter filter using the high-pass filter or singular value decomposition (SVD) based filter 15) to suppress such stationary signals.…”
In our previous study, we analyzed the contrast of blood flow echo, and non-speckle regions were more frequently detected in the porcine blood with the high flow velocity. However, this contrast method is dependent on the degree of smoothing and threshold for outliers. This study developed a new U-Net model incorporating domain adaptation with both in silico and experimental data. This model segments blood flow echo into speckle and non-speckle regions. The performance of the developed U-Net model with several conditions of scatterer number density from 0.1 to 1.5 scatterers/mm3 and scatterer amplitude from 2 to 50 times against the speckle component was assessed using in silico data and experimental data with blood-mimicking fluid. The results indicated that the developed U-Net model with adversarial learning could stably detect non-speckle regions compared to the model without the adversarial learning and the contrast analysis method, in both in silico and experimental data.
“…[19][20][21] Our previous study has compared velocity estimates by ultrasonic and optical PIVs under the typical BMF conditions. 22) However, the acoustic properties such as SoS, attenuation coefficient, and backscatter coefficient (BSC) of those typical BMFs were not characterized so far.…”
A blood mimicking fluid (BMF) is imperative for the evaluation of Doppler ultrasound. Doppler ultrasound still causes errors due to some artifacts such as aliasing and presence of grating lobes. One of the other velocimeters is the optical particle image velocimeter (PIV). This study initially developed an in vitro measurement system for analyzing flowing BMF with ultrasonic and optical PIVs. The acoustic properties such as speed of sound, attenuation, and backscatter coefficient of BMF equivalent to the human blood, used for both ultrasonic and optical PIVs were analyzed in a frequency range of 4-12 MHz. The velocity profiles were estimated by ultrasonic and optical PIVs using a block matching method. A difference between velocities obtained by ultrasonic and optical data was within 4.0% using BMF with 20 µm polyamide particle at 0.2% concentration that realized the acoustic properties and speckle patterns similar to those in ultrafast ultrasound blood flow imaging.
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