Contrast-free Ultrafast Microvessel Imaging

For ultrafast, contrast-free microvessel imaging, we leverage the high frame rate of compounding plane wave imaging to rapidly collect a large amount of ultrasound data (A) within a short period of time to boost the Doppler sensitivity to small vessels. We are also interested in developing advanced tissue clutter filtering techniques such as those based on singular value decomposition (B) to robustly extract the blood signal from tissue and noise. As shown in the figure below, ultrafast microvessel imaging significantly improves the visibility of small vessels in vivo. Our group is also actively developing 3D ultrafast ultrasound imaging techniques to extend ultrafast microvessel imaging from 2D to 3D.

Related publications:

†Co-first author     *Corresponding author

  1. You Q, Lowerison MR, Shin Y, Chen X, ChandraSekaran NV, Dong Z, Llano DA, Anastasio MA, Song P*, “Contrast-free Super-resolution Doppler (CS-Doppler) Based on Deep Generative Neural Networks,” bioRxiv preprint.
  2. Kou Z, You Q, Kim J, Dong Z, Lowerison MR, Sekaran NVC, Llano DA, Song P, Oelze ML*, “Towards a Real-time Continuous Ultrafast Ultrasound Beamformer with Programmable Logic,” arXiv preprint.
  3. Applegate CC, Lowerison MR, Hambley E, Song P, Wallig MA, Erdman JW*, “Dietary Tomato Inhibits Angiogenesis in TRAMP Prostate Cancer But Is Not Protective With a Western-style Diet In This Pilot Study” Scientific Reports, 11:18548, pp. 1-13, 2021.
  4. Huang C, Song P, Gong P, Lok UW, Tang S, Trzasko JD, Manduca A, Chen S*, “Simultaneous Noise Suppression and Incoherent Artifact Reduction in Ultrafast Ultrasound Vascular Imaging,” IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, vol. 68, issue 6, pp. 2075-2085, 2021.
  5. Lok UW, Trzasko JD, Huang C, Tang S, Gong P, Lucien F, Kim Y, Lowerison MR, Song P, Chen S*, “Improved Ultrasound Microvessel Imaging (UMI) Using Deconvolution with Total Variation Regularization,” Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1089-1098, 2021.
  6. Lok UW, Song P, Trzasko JD, Daigle RE, Borisch EA, Huang C, Gong P, Ling W, Chen S*, “Real time SVD-based clutter filtering using randomized singular value decomposition and spatial downsampling for micro-vessel imaging on a Verasonics system”, Ultrasonics, vol. 107, 106163, pp. 1-11, 2020.
  7. Gong P†, Song P†, Kolbe AB, Sheedy SP, Huang C, Ling W, Yu Y, Lok UW, Tang S, Knudsen JM, Bruining DH, Chen S*, “Quantitative Inflammation Assessment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Using Ultrafast Ultrasound Microvessel Imaging: A Pilot Study” Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine, 39:1819-1827, 2020.
  8. Gong P†, Song P†, Huang C, Fazzio RT, Ruddy KJ, Ghosh K, Meixner DD, Ling W*, Chen S, “Ultra-sensitive Ultrasound Microvessel Imaging for Characterizing Benign and Malignant Breast Tumors,” Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, vol. 45, issue 12, pp. 3128-3136, 2019.
  9. (Journal cover) Huang C, Song P, Gong P, Trzasko JD, Manduca A, Chen S*, “Debiasing-based Noise Suppression for Ultrafast Ultrasound Microvessel Imaging,” IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, vol. 66, no. 8, pp. 1281-1291, 2019.
  10. Huang C†, Lowerison MR†, Lucien F, Wang D, Gong P, Song P*, Chen S*, “Noninvasive Contrast-Free 3D Evaluation of Tumor Angiogenesis with Ultrasensitive Ultrasound Microvessel Imaging,” Scientific Reports, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 4907, 2019.
  11. Song P, Manduca A, Trzasko JD, Chen S*, “Letters: Noise Equalization for Ultrafast Plane Wave Microvessel Imaging,” IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, vol. 64, issue 11, pp. 1776-1781, 2017.
  12. Song P, Trzasko JD, Manduca A, Qiang B, Kadirvel R, Kallmes DF, Chen S*, “Accelerated Singular Value-Based Ultrasound Blood Flow Clutter Filtering with Randomized Singular Value Decomposition (rSVD) and Randomized Spatial Downsampling,” IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, vol. 64, no. 4, pp. 706-716, 2017.
  13. Song P, Manduca A, Trzasko JD, Chen S*, “Ultrasound Small Vessel Imaging with Block-wise Adaptive Local Clutter Filtering,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 251-262, 2017.