Ultrasound B-Scan to Thru-Scan Reconstructions of Scatterers via Power Law Constraints

This work presents the first application of the Thru-scan framework to a range of ultrasound images across frequency bands, from 3 MHz human abdominal scans to high frequency preclinical scans. The Thru-scan is a constrained reconstruction of the subresolved scatterers based on a power law distribution and enforced by appropriate selection of power law filters. The resulting reconstructions mitigate the traditional speckle "noise" pattern, with substantially increased resolution at high spatial frequencies. Improvements in contrast and apparent resolution are quantified using the generalized contrast-to-noise ratio (gCNR): Thru-scan increases gCNR by approximately 0.07 to 0.10 units, with p-values of less than 0.001. The Thru-scan processing steps also modify the amplitude distribution of the traditional B-scan, and across all frequency bands and anatomical targets the results are well modeled as a Burr distribution with power law exponents near 2.