A balanced super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging method for super-resolution ultrasound

Ultrasound (US) imaging technique is currently one of the most common imaging techniques in clinical application, but the spatial resolution is low. Recently, with the aid of contrast agents, super-resolution ultrasound imaging technique has been proposed, which can overcome the diffraction limit in US by using the super-localization method, similar to super-resolution optical microscopy. But, there is still a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution in super-resolution US imaging. To address the problem, inspired by super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging (SOFI), in this paper, we apply SOFI to US imaging to achieve a good imaging performance. Further, to cancel the nonlinear response to brightness in SOFI, the balanced SOFI (bSOFI) is also used in this paper, which allows to achieve the higher spatial resolution. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method, the numerical simulation was performed based on a dynamic phantom model, which was scanned by synthetic transmit aperture (STA) technique. The result indicates that by using the proposed method (SOFI or bSOFI), the imaging performance of US can be improved compared to STA. In addition, when using bSOFI method, the imaging performance of super-resolution US can be further improved, compared with SOFI method.