Simultaneous Noise Suppression and Incoherent Artifact Reduction in Ultrafast Ultrasound Vascular Imaging

作者：Chengwu Huang, Pengfei Song, Joshua D. Trzasko, Ping Gong, U‐Wai Lok, Shanshan Tang, Armando Manduca, Shigao Chen · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1109/tuffc.2021.3055498 · 被引用次数：52 · 研究领域：Ultrasound Imaging and Elastography、Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Imaging、Ultrasonics and Acoustic Wave Propagation

Ultrasound vascular imaging based on ultrafast plane wave imaging and singular value decomposition (SVD) clutter filtering has demonstrated superior sensitivity in blood flow detection. However, ultrafast ultrasound vascular imaging is susceptible to electronic noise due to the weak penetration of unfocused waves, leading to a lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at larger depths. In addition, incoherent clutter artifacts originating from strong and moving tissue scatterers that cannot be completely removed create a strong mask on top of the blood signal that obscures the vessels. Herein, a method that can simultaneously suppress the background noise and incoherent artifacts is proposed. The method divides the tilted plane or diverging waves into two subgroups. Coherent spatial compounding is performed within each subgroup, resulting in two compounded data sets. An SVD-based clutter filter is applied to each data set, followed by a correlation between the two data sets to produce a vascular image. Uncorrelated noise and incoherent artifacts can be effectively suppressed with the correlation process, while the coherent blood signal can be preserved. The method was evaluated in wire-target simulations and phantom, in which around 7-10-dB SNR improvement was shown. Consistent results were found in a flow channel phantom with improved SNR by the proposed method (39.9 ± 0.2 dB) against conventional power Doppler (29.1 ± 0.6 dB). Last, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the method c...