Microvascular blood flow ultrasound imaging with microbubble-based H-Scan technology

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Biomedical Engineering
• Ultrasound Technology

Background:

• Ultrasound blood flow imaging is vital for diagnosing cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.
• Conventional ultrafast ultrasound plane-wave imaging has limitations in microvascular imaging quality.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a microbubble-based H-Scan ultrasound imaging technique to enhance microvascular imaging.
• To improve the sensitivity and accuracy of ultrasound blood flow imaging.

Main Methods:

• Utilized high-order H-Scan to detect Rayleigh scattering from blood flow and microbubbles.
• Applied clutter filtering using Casorati matrix singular value decomposition (Casorati-SVD) in the B channel.
• Compared results with a control group without H-Scan.

Main Results:

• Achieved an average 38.61% increase in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
• Achieved an average 39.5% increase in contrast signal-to-noise ratio (CNR).
• Visibly enhanced microvascular flow imaging quality.

Conclusions:

• The microbubble-based H-Scan technique significantly improves ultrasound blood flow imaging.
• Demonstrates considerable potential for enhanced clinical diagnosis of vascular diseases.