Bandwidth Improvement in Ultrasound Image Reconstruction Using Deep Learning Techniques

Ultrasound (US) imaging is a medical imaging modality that uses the reflection of sound in the range of 2-18 MHz to image internal body structures. In US, the frequency bandwidth (BW) is directly associated with image resolution. BW is a property of the transducer and more bandwidth comes at a higher cost. Thus, methods that can transform strongly bandlimited ultrasound data into broadband data are essential. In this work, we propose a deep learning (DL) technique to improve the image quality for a given bandwidth by learning features provided by broadband data of the same field of view. Therefore, the performance of several DL architectures and conventional state-of-the-art techniques for image quality improvement and artifact removal have been compared on in vitro US datasets. Two training losses have been utilized on three different architectures: a super resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN), U-Net, and a residual encoder decoder network (REDNet) architecture. The models have been trained to transform low-bandwidth image reconstructions to high-bandwidth image reconstructions, to reduce the artifacts, and make the reconstructions visually more attractive. Experiments were performed for 20%, 40%, and 60% fractional bandwidth on the original images and showed that the improvements obtained are as high as 45.5% in RMSE, and 3.85 dB in PSNR, in datasets with a 20% bandwidth limitation.