High-contrast ultrafast imaging of the heart

Noninvasive ultrafast imaging of intrinsic waves such as electromechanical waves or remotely induced shear waves in elastography imaging techniques for human cardiac applications remains challenging. In this paper, we propose ultrafast imaging of the heart with adapted sector size by coherently compounding diverging waves emitted from a standard transthoracic cardiac phased-array probe. As in ultrafast imaging with plane wave coherent compounding, diverging waves can be summed coherently to obtain high-quality images of the entire heart at high frame rate in a full field of view. To image the propagation of shear waves with a large SNR, the field of view can be adapted by changing the angular aperture of the transmitted wave. Backscattered echoes from successive circular wave acquisitions are coherently summed at every location in the image to improve the image quality while maintaining very high frame rates. The transmitted diverging waves, angular apertures, and subaperture sizes were tested in simulation, and ultrafast coherent compounding was implemented in a commercial scanner. The improvement of the imaging quality was quantified in phantoms and in one human heart, in vivo. Imaging shear wave propagation at 2500 frames/s using 5 diverging waves provided a large increase of the SNR of the tissue velocity estimates while maintaining a high frame rate. Finally, ultrafast imaging with 1 to 5 diverging waves was used to image the human heart at a frame rate of 4500 to 900 frames/s over an entire cardiac cycle. Spatial coherent compounding provided a strong improvement of the imaging quality, even with a small number of transmitted diverging waves and a high frame rate, which allows imaging of the propagation of electromechanical and shear waves with good image quality.