Postprocessing Approaches for the Improvement of Cardiac Ultrasound B-Mode Images: A Review

Perperidis, Antonios

doi:10.1109/tuffc.2016.2526670

Cited by 34 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 131 publications

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“…Post-formation image processing techniques, such as image segmentation (Noble and Boukerroui 2006) and motion analysis (Ledesma-Carbayo et al 2006) have been attempted on cardiac ultrasound images. However, high levels of clutter limit effectiveness of such techniques in a considerable proportion of cardiac data sets (Perperidis 2016). Additionally, clutter inhibits visualization of abnormalities, such as tumors and vegetations (Bell et al 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying the Origin of Reverberation Clutter in Echocardiography: In Vitro Experiments and In Vivo Demonstrations

Fatemi

Berg

Rodríguez-Molares

2019

Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology

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Clutter in echocardiography hinders the visualization of the heart and reduces the diagnostic value of the images. The detailed mechanisms that generate clutter are, however, not well understood. We present five different hypotheses for generation of clutter based on reverberation artifact with a focus on apical four-chamber view echocardiograms. We demonstrate the plausibility of our hypotheses by in vitro experiments and by comparing the results with in vivo recordings from four volunteers. The results show that clutter in echocardiography can be originated both at structures that lie in the ultrasound beam path and at those that are outside the imaging plane. We show that reverberations from echogenic structures outside the imaging plane can make clutter over the image if the ultrasound beam gets deflected out of its intended path by specular reflection at the ribs. Different clutter types in the in vivo examples show that the appearance of clutter varies, depending on the tissue from which it originates. The results of this work can be applied to improve clutter reduction techniques or to design ultrasound transducers that give higher quality cardiac images. The results can also help cardiologists have a better understanding of clutter in echocardiograms and acquire better images based on the type and the source of the clutter.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying the Origin of Reverberation Clutter in Echocardiography: In Vitro Experiments and In Vivo Demonstrations

Fatemi

Berg

Rodríguez-Molares

2019

Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology

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“…Further, compounding can be incoherent or coherent [55] depending if the compounding happens after or before envelope detection, respectively. Incoherent spatial compounding, which we implemented, has been considered [56]- [58] as a promising technique for reducing the speckle and clutter effects [59] of the US images, with the ability to improve the organ delineations and boundaries. To support spatial compounding, we provide the possibility of steering the emission origin by (0 • , ±10 • , ±20 • ) in both azimuth and elevation.…”

Section: E Spatial Compound Imagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The compounding operation itself is lightweight, and we choose to implement it in software on the platform's MicroBlaze, although hardware acceleration would be possible too. Different operators can be used for compounding in order to formulate one final image out of the contributing reconstructions [58], [60]. Our design currently supports the typical averaging-excludingthe-brightest-voxel operator, the minimum brightness voxel, and the maximum brightness voxel compounding, and can be easily extended further.…”

Section: E Spatial Compound Imagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Ultrasound Everywhere: A Portable 3D Digital Back-End Capable of Zone and Compound Imaging

Ibrahim

Zhang

Angiolini

et al. 2018

IEEE Trans. Biomed. Circuits Syst.

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Ultrasound imaging is a ubiquitous diagnostic technique, but does not fit the requirements of the telemedicine approach, because it relies on the real-time manipulation and image recognition skills of a trained expert, called sonographer. Sonographers are only available in hospitals and clinics, negating or at least delaying access to ultrasound scans in many locales-rural areas, developing countries-as well as in medical rescue operations. Telesonography would require an advanced imager that supports three-dimensional (3-D) acquisition; this would allow untrained operators to acquire broad scans and upload them remotely for diagnosis. Such advanced imagers do exist, but do not meet several other requirements for telesonography, such as being portable, inexpensive, and sufficiently low power to enable battery operation. In this work, we present our prototype of the first portable 3-D digital ultrasound back-end system. The prototype is implemented in a single midrange Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA), for an estimated power consumption of 5 W. The device supports up to 1024 input channels, which is state of the art and could be scaled further, and supports multiple image reconstruction modes. We evaluate the resource utilization of the FPGA and provide various quality metrics to ascertain the output image quality.

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“…Numerous approaches to enhancement of cardiac ultrasound images have been suggested (Perperidis 2016). Spatial compounding is a popular method that suppresses noise by combining partially decorrelated images produced by imaging the target region of interest from different viewing angles.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Enhancement of B-Mode Cardiac Ultrasound Image Sequences

Perperidis

Cusack

White

et al. 2017

Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology

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Limited contrast, along with speckle and acoustic noise, can reduce the diagnostic value of echocardiographic images. This study introduces dynamic histogram-based intensity mapping (DHBIM), a novel approach employing temporal variations in the cumulative histograms of cardiac ultrasound images to contrast enhance the imaged structures. DHBIM is then combined with spatial compounding to compensate for noise and speckle. The proposed techniques are quantitatively assessed (32 clinical data sets) employing (i) standard image quality measures and (ii) the repeatability of routine clinical measurements, such as chamber diameter and wall thickness. DHBIM introduces a mean increase of 120.9% in tissue/chamber detectability, improving the overall repeatability of clinical measurements by 17%. The integrated approach of DHBIM followed by spatial compounding provides the best overall enhancement of image quality and diagnostic value, consistently outperforming the individual approaches and achieving a 401.4% average increase in tissue/chamber detectability with an associated 24.3% improvement in the overall repeatability of clinical measurements.

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Postprocessing Approaches for the Improvement of Cardiac Ultrasound B-Mode Images: A Review

Cited by 34 publications

References 131 publications

Studying the Origin of Reverberation Clutter in Echocardiography: In Vitro Experiments and In Vivo Demonstrations

Studying the Origin of Reverberation Clutter in Echocardiography: In Vitro Experiments and In Vivo Demonstrations

Towards Ultrasound Everywhere: A Portable 3D Digital Back-End Capable of Zone and Compound Imaging

Dynamic Enhancement of B-Mode Cardiac Ultrasound Image Sequences

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