Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ULTRASONICS FERROELECTRICS AND FREQUENCY CONTROL
Volume 70, Issue 7, Pages 708-720Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TUFFC.2023.3280803
Keywords
Fast imaging; flow imaging; medical ultrasound; synthetic aperture (SA)
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Synthetic aperture (SA) can be used for both anatomic and functional imaging, providing information on tissue motion and blood velocity. This article proposes the development of a single, universal sequence for linear array SA imaging, which can generate high-quality linear and nonlinear B-mode images as well as accurate motion and flow estimates for varying blood velocities and super-resolution images.
Synthetic aperture (SA) can be used for both anatomic and functional imaging, where tissue motion and blood velocity are revealed. Often, sequences optimized for anatomic B-mode imaging are different from functional sequences, as the best distribution and number of emissions are different. B-mode sequences demand many emissions for a high contrast, whereas flow sequences demand short sequences for high correlations yielding accurate velocity estimates. This article hypothesizes that a single, universal sequence can be developed for linear array SA imaging. This sequence yields high-quality linear and nonlinear B-mode images as well as accurate motion and flow estimates for high and low blood velocities and super-resolution images. Interleaved sequences with positive and negative pulse emissions for the same spherical virtual source were used to enable flow estimation for high velocities and make continuous long acquisitions for low-velocity estimation. An optimized pulse inversion (PI) sequence with 2 x 12 virtual sources was implemented for four different linear array probes connected to either a Verasonics Vantage 256 scanner or the SARUS experimental scanner. The virtual sources were evenly distributed over the whole aperture and permuted in emission order for making flow estimation possible using 4, 8, or 12 virtual sources. The frame rate was 208 Hz for fully independent images for a pulse repetition frequency of 5 kHz, and recursive imaging yielded 5000 images per second. Data were acquired from a phantom mimicking the carotid artery with pulsating flow and the kidney of a Sprague-Dawley rat. Examples include anatomic high contrast B-mode, non-linear B-mode, tissue motion, power Doppler, color flow mapping (CFM), vector velocity imaging, and super-resolution imaging (SRI) derived from the same dataset and demonstrate that all imaging modes can be shown retrospectively and quantitative data derived from it.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available