A General-Purpose Framework for Microvascular Reconstruction and Quantitative Analysis in Ultrasound Localization...

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging
• Vascular Biology

Background:

• Microvascular alterations are crucial early disease biomarkers.
• Current noninvasive imaging lacks capillary resolution and standardized analysis for clinical use.
• Ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM) offers super-resolution but needs generalized reconstruction and quantification pipelines.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a standardized framework, ULM-based Vascular Biomarker Automated Analysis (U-VBA), for microvascular imaging reconstruction and automated biomarker analysis.
• To integrate motion correction, advanced denoising, and a panel of vascular biomarkers into a single pipeline.
• To demonstrate the feasibility and performance of U-VBA in preclinical animal models and clinical patient data.

Main Methods:

• Developed U-VBA integrating motion correction, cascaded denoising (SVD, high-pass filtering, background subtraction).
• Quantified six vascular biomarkers: density, intervessel distance, diameter, velocity, perfusion, and tortuosity.
• Validated performance in flow phantoms, chicken chorioallantoic membranes, rabbit optic nerve injury models, and a clinical cohort of cervical lymph node tumors.

Main Results:

• U-VBA resolved capillaries down to 16.2 μm in vivo and accurately captured vascular changes in rabbit eye models.
• In a clinical cohort (n=39), U-VBA differentiated 3 lymph node conditions with 85% accuracy using 4 biomarkers (intervessel distance, diameter, perfusion, tortuosity).
• Demonstrated robust performance across various validation settings.

Conclusions:

• U-VBA standardizes microvascular phenotyping using ULM, enabling noninvasive analysis of vascular biomarkers.
• The framework integrates into routine ultrasound workflows for both preclinical research and clinical applications.
• U-VBA represents a significant advancement in bridging advanced microvascular imaging with automated clinical biomarker analysis.