KEYWORDS: Arteries, Motion estimation, Image processing, Data acquisition, Ultrasonography, Image segmentation, Data analysis, Transducers, In vivo imaging, Image visualization
Atherosclerosis is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease. The early diagnosis of atherosclerosis is of clinical interest since it can prevent any adverse effects of atherosclerotic vascular diseases. In this paper, a new carotid artery radial strain estimation method based on autocorrelation is presented. In the proposed method, the strain is first estimated by the autocorrelation of two complex signals from the consecutive frames. Then, the angular phase from autocorrelation is converted to strain and strain rate and they are analyzed over time. In addition, a 2D strain image over region of interest in a carotid artery can be displayed. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed radial strain estimation method, radiofrequency (RF) data of 408 frames in the carotid artery of a volunteer were acquired by a commercial ultrasound system equipped with a research package (V10, Samsung Medison, Korea) by using a L5-13IS linear array transducer. From in vivo carotid artery data, the mean strain estimate was -0.1372 while its minimum and maximum values were -2.961 and 0.909, respectively. Moreover, the overall strain estimates are highly correlated with the reconstructed M-mode trace. Similar results were obtained from the estimation of the strain rate change over time. These results indicate that the proposed carotid artery radial strain estimation method is useful for assessing the arterial wall’s stiffness noninvasively without increasing the computational complexity.
Synthetic aperture (SA) imaging techniques can enhance spatial resolution in medical ultrasound imaging. However,
it suffers from the degradation of image quality close to a virtual source (e.g., transmit focal point) since there is no
enough transmit acoustic field energy. In this paper, a new SA imaging technique (i.e., dynamic synthetic aperture, DSA)
where the number of synthetic scanlines for acoustic field superposition is dynamically adjusted based on the transmit
acoustic field analysis. For the DSA technique, the dynamic apodization window function was generated from the Field
II simulation and applied in the phantom and in vivo experiments. The raw radio-frequency (RF) data for phantom and in
vivo experiments were captured by an Ultrasonix's SonixTouch research platform connected with a SonixDAQ parallel
acquisition system. From the phantom experiment, the proposed DSA method shows the enhanced spatial resolution over
the depth compared to the conventional receive dynamic focusing (CRDF). In addition, it doesn't yield any artifacts
associated with the lack of enough transmit acoustic energy shown in the conventional SA imaging technique. The
consistent results were obtained with the in vivo breast data. This result indicates that the proposed DSA method could be
used for enhancing image quality of medical ultrasound imaging.
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