Non-invasive Small Vessel Imaging of Human Thyroid Using Motion-Corrected Spatiotemporal Clutter Filtering

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Ultrasound Technology
• Thyroid Diagnostics

Background:

• Assessing small vessel blood flow in the thyroid is challenging due to physiological motion.
• Contrast agents are often used, but non-invasive methods are preferred.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate if motion correction before singular value decomposition (SVD)-based clutter filtering improves thyroid small vessel visualization.
• To assess the impact of motion correction on Doppler data coherency and clutter suppression.

Main Methods:

• Utilized compounded plane wave imaging on a clinical ultrasound scanner.
• Implemented rigid body-based motion correction using 2-D normalized cross-correlation speckle tracking.
• Applied SVD-based spatiotemporal clutter filtering to power Doppler data.

Main Results:

• Phantom studies showed motion significantly reduced spatiotemporal data covariance.
• In vivo studies demonstrated improved visualization of small thyroid vessels with motion correction.
• Contrast-to-noise ratio of blood signal increased substantially with motion correction (e.g., 8.17 dB vs. 0.87 dB).

Conclusions:

• Motion correction enhances the visualization of small vessel blood flow in the thyroid using ultrasound.
• This non-invasive technique shows promise for improved thyroid nodule assessment.
• Further validation in moving organs is warranted.