ASAP: Super-Contrast Vasculature Imaging Using Coherence Analysis and High Frame-Rate Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound

The very high frame rate afforded by ultrafast ultrasound, combined with microbubble contrast agents, opens new opportunities for imaging tissue microvasculature. However, new imaging paradigms are required to obtain superior image quality from the large amount of acquired data while allowing real-time implementation. In this paper, we report a technique-acoustic sub-aperture processing (ASAP)-capable of generating very high contrast/signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) images of macro-and microvessels, with similar computational complexity to classical power Doppler (PD) imaging. In ASAP, the received data are split into subgroups. The reconstructed data from each subgroup are temporally correlated over frames to generate the final image. As signals in subgroups are correlated but the noise is not, this substantially reduces the noise floor compared to PD. Using a clinical imaging probe, the method is shown to visualize vessels down to $200~\mu \text{m}$ with a SNR of 10 dB higher than PD and to resolve microvascular flow/perfusion information in rabbit kidneys noninvasively in vivo at multiple centimeter depths. With careful filter design, the technique also allows the estimation of flow direction and the separation of fast flow from tissue perfusion. ASAP can readily be implemented into hardware/firmware for real-time imaging and can be applied to contrast enhanced and potentially noncontrast imaging and 3-D imaging.