Fast Super-Resolution Ultrasound Imaging With Compressed Sensing Reconstruction Method and Single Plane Wave Transmission

Super-resolution ultrasound (SR-US) imaging technique breaks the diffraction limit and can image microvascular structure. However, the temporal resolution of SR-US is limited because a long data acquisition time is required to accumulate enough microbubbles. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we proposed a new SR-US method based on compressed sensing (CS), which is used to identify the highly overlapped microbubbles in each frame. To further speed up the data acquisition of SR-US, here, U.S. data was generated by single plane wave (SPW) transmission. To evaluate the performance of the proposed technique (CS reconstruction method combined with SPW transmission, termed as CSRM-SPW), a series of numerical simulation was performed. Especially, considering that SPW has a relatively low spatial resolution, it may affect the obtained SR-US imaging performance. We compare the effect of synthetic transmit aperture (STA) and SPW on SR-US. The results indicate the overlapped microbubbles can be identified by the CSRM method when compared with the traditional localization method (e.g., Gaussian fitting method). In addition, whatever STA or SPW images are used as the input data of CS reconstruction, the localization accuracy of SR-US obtained by the CSRM method is similar. Further, by using the CSRM combined with SPW technique, the vascular network can be accurately resolved, even if the high-density microbubbles existed in each frame. As a result, the proposed CSRM-SPW technique is suitable for fast SR-US imaging.