Multidimensional Clutter Filtering of Aperture Domain Data for Improved Blood Flow Sensitivity

Ozgun, Kathryn; Byram, Brett

doi:10.1109/tuffc.2021.3073292

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…For instance, Huang et al applied acoustic sub‐aperture processing (ASAP) method on ULM for improved microvascular delineation 54 . To better extract blood flow signals from tissue clutters, high‐order‐singular‐value‐decomposition (HOSVD) 55 and robust catchy‐based principle composition analysis (RPCA) can be utilized 56 . Spatiotemporal nonlocal means filtering (stNLM) considers the difference between MBs trajectories and noise in the spatiotemporal domain to suppress noise and maintain the blood flow signals for improved ULM 38 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Early Diabetic Kidney Disease Using Ultrasound Localization Microscopy: A Feasibility Study

Zhang

Huang

Yang

et al. 2023

J of Ultrasound Medicine

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ObjectiveThe purpose of this study is to detect the hemodynamic changes of microvessels in the early stage of diabetic kidney disease (DKD) and to test the feasibility of ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM) in early diagnosis of DKD.MethodsIn this study, streptozotocin (STZ) induced DKD rat model was used. Normal rats served as the control group. Conventional ultrasound, contrast‐enhanced ultrasound (CEUS), and ULM data were collected and analyzed. The kidney cortex was divided into four segments, which are 0.25–0.5 mm (Segment 1), 0.5–0.75 mm (Segment 2), 0.75–1 mm (Segment 3), and 1–1.25 mm (Segment 4) away from the renal capsule, respectively. The mean blood flow velocities of arteries and veins in each segment were separately calculated, and also the velocity gradients and overall mean velocities of arteries and veins. Mann–Whitney U test was used for comparison of the data.ResultsQuantitative results of microvessel velocity obtained by ULM show that the arterial velocity of Segments 2, 3, and 4, and the overall mean arterial velocity of the four segments in the DKD group are significantly lower than those in the normal group. The venous velocity of Segment 3 and the overall mean venous velocity of the four segments in the DKD group are higher than those in the normal group. The arterial velocity gradient in the DKD group is lower than that in the normal group.ConclusionULM can visualize and quantify the blood flow and may be used for early diagnosis of DKD.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Early Diabetic Kidney Disease Using Ultrasound Localization Microscopy: A Feasibility Study

Zhang

Huang

Yang

et al. 2023

J of Ultrasound Medicine

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“…In terms of the data to be filtered, GA-SVD is applied to the concatenated Casorati matrix of angular data while SVD is applied to the Casorati matrix after multi-angle coherent compounding. This means that scatter translation and noise distribution realization are imaged differently, which results in different temporal information (Ozgun andByram 2021, Pialot et al 2023). In addition, the spatial sample size of concatenated Casorati matrix of angular data is increased by a factor of N (equal to the number of angles), which is beneficial for subspace classification (Mestre 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clutter filtering of angular domain data for contrast-free ultrafast microvascular imaging

Jiang,

Chu,

et al. 2023

Phys. Med. Biol.

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Objective. Contrast-free microvascular imaging is clinically valuable for the assessment of physiological status and the early diagnosis of diseases. Effective clutter filtering is essential for microvascular visualization without contrast enhancement. Singular value decomposition (SVD)-based spatiotemporal filter has been widely used to suppress clutter. However, clinical real-time imaging relies on short ensembles (dozens of frames), which limits the implementation of SVD filtering due to the large error of eigen-correlated estimations and high dependence on optimal threshold when used in such ensembles. Approach. To address the above challenges of imaging in short ensembles, two optimized filters of angular domain data are proposed in this paper: grouped angle SVD (GA-SVD) and angular-coherence-based higher-order SVD (AC-HOSVD). GA-SVD applies SVD to the concatenation of all angular data to improve clutter rejection performance in short ensembles, while AC-HOSVD applies HOSVD to the angular data tensor and utilizes angular coherence in addition to spatial and temporal features for filtering. Feasible threshold selection strategies in each feature space are provided. The clutter rejection performance of the proposed filters and SVD was evaluated with Doppler phantom and in vivo studies at different cases. Moreover, the robustness of the filters was explored under wrong singular value threshold estimation, and their computational complexity was studied. Main results. Qualitative and quantitative results indicated that GA-SVD and AC-HOSVD can effectively improve clutter rejection performance in short ensembles, especially AC-HOSVD. Notably, the proposed methods using 20 frames had similar image quality to SVD using 100 frames. In vivo studies showed that compared to SVD, GA-SVD increased the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) by 6.03 dB on average, and AC-HOSVD increased the SNR by 8.93 dB on average. Furthermore, AC-HOSVD remained better power Doppler image quality under non-optimal thresholds, followed by GA-SVD. Significance. The proposed filters can greatly enhance contrast-free microvascular visualization in short ensembles and have potential for different clinical translations due to the performance differences.

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“…However, a proper cut-off selection to separate noise and blood flow will be required, which may not be as effective when blood flow signal and noise are not well separatable in the singular value domain [28]. More advanced clutter filters such as high-order SVD and Cauchy-RPCA filters exhibit promise while they are still relatively computationally expensive [29][30][31][32]. The spatial coherence of ultrasound backscattering in the channel domain has also been well established and leveraged to produce coherent flow power Doppler image with superior flow detection, and effective suppression of noise and incoherent reverberation clutter [33,34].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancement of Ultrasound Microbubble and Blood Flow Imaging using Similarity Measurement

Huang

2023

Preprint

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<p>Recent advancements in ultrasound technologies, such as ultrasound localization microscopy and ultrafast ultrasound Doppler, have enabled high-definition imaging of microvasculature. However, detecting weak microbubble or blood flow signals amid strong background noise remains a challenge, particularly in deep tissues. This study aims to enhance the signal contrast of microbubble and blood flow by leveraging their distinct spatial-temporal coherence in comparison to undesired noise for robust microbubble detection and microvascular imaging. We propose to quantify the signal coherence based on similarity analysis of beamformed ultrasound microbubble/blood flow data within the plane wave imaging framework. A spatial pixel is considered more likely to be a true microbubble/blood flow signal with a higher level of similarity, which can be measured by either of the following methods: 1) spatially block-wise normalized cross-correlation between two compounded frames; 2) temporally normalized autocorrelation across multiple compounded frames; 3) normalized cross-correlation between two subsets of post-compounded frames; 4) normalized autocorrelation of the pre-compounded data across angular direction. The original microbubble/blood flow signal is then weighted by the similarity measurement on a pixel-by-pixel basis to generate images with an improved signal contrast. The robustness of the proposed methods was first demonstrated in both phantom experiments and in vivo microbubble data from kidney transplant. We further validated their feasibility in blood flow imaging without the use of microbubbles based on in vivo data of human liver and kidney. Significant contrast improvement was observed, facilitating better visualization and detection of both microbubble and noncontrast microflow signals, which indicates a great potential of the methods for improved microvascular imaging and widespread clinical translation.</p>

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Multidimensional Clutter Filtering of Aperture Domain Data for Improved Blood Flow Sensitivity

Cited by 14 publications

References 49 publications

Evaluation of Early Diabetic Kidney Disease Using Ultrasound Localization Microscopy: A Feasibility Study

Evaluation of Early Diabetic Kidney Disease Using Ultrasound Localization Microscopy: A Feasibility Study

Clutter filtering of angular domain data for contrast-free ultrafast microvascular imaging

Enhancement of Ultrasound Microbubble and Blood Flow Imaging using Similarity Measurement

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