Non-negative constraint for image-based breathing gating in ultrasound hepatic perfusion data

Images acquired during free breathing using contrast enhanced ultrasound hepatic perfusion imaging exhibits a periodic motion pattern. It needs to be compensated for if a further accurate quantification of the hepatic perfusion analysis is to be executed. To reduce the impact of respiratory motion, image-based breathing gating algorithm was used to compensate the respiratory motion in contrast enhanced ultrasound. The algorithm contains three steps of which respiratory kinetics extracted, image subsequences determined and image subsequences registered. The basic performance of the algorithm was to extract the respiratory kinetics of the ultrasound hepatic perfusion image sequences accurately. In this paper, we treated the kinetics extracted model as a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) problem. We extracted the respiratory kinetics of the ultrasound hepatic perfusion image sequences by non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). The technique involves using the NMF objective function to accurately extract respiratory kinetics. It was tested on simulative phantom and used to analyze 6 liver CEUS hepatic perfusion image sequences. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed method in quantitative and qualitative.