Ultrasound imaging has been improving, but continues to suffer from inherent artifacts that are challenging to model, such as attenuation, shadowing, diffraction, speckle, etc. These artifacts can potentially confuse image analysis algorithms unless an attempt is made to assess the certainty of individual pixel values. Our novel confidence algorithms analyze pixel values using a directed acyclic graph based on acoustic physical properties of ultrasound imaging. We demonstrate unique capabilities of our approach and compare it against previous confidence-measurement algorithms for shadow-detection and image-compounding tasks.
Ultrasound 3D compounding is important for volumetric reconstruction, but as of yet there is no consensus on best practices for compounding. Ultrasound images depend on probe direction and the path sound waves pass through, so when multiple intersecting B-scans of the same spot from different perspectives yield different pixel values, there is not a single, ideal representation for compounding (i.e. combining) the overlapping pixel values. Current popular methods inevitably suppress or altogether leave out bright or dark regions that are useful, and potentially introduce new artifacts. In this…
Ultrasound image quality has continually been improving. However, when needles or other metallic objects are operating inside the tissue, the resulting reverberation artifacts can severely corrupt the surrounding image quality. Such effects are challenging for existing computer vision algorithms for medical image analysis. Needle reverberation artifacts can be hard to identify at times and affect various pixel values to different degrees. The boundaries of such artifacts are ambiguous, leading to disagreement among human experts labeling the artifacts. We propose a weakly- and semi-supervised,…
Non-destructive characterization of multi-layered structures that can be accessed from only a single side is important for applications such as well-bore integrity inspection. Existing methods related to Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT) rapidly produce acceptable results but with significant artifacts. Recently, ultrasound model-based iterative reconstruction (UMBIR) approaches have shown significant improvements over SAFT. However, even these methods produce ringing artifacts due to the high fractional-bandwidth of the excitation signal. In this paper, we propose a ringing artifac…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
Ultrasound imaging (US) often suffers from distinct image artifacts from various sources. Classic approaches for solving these problems are usually model-based iterative approaches that have been developed specifically for each type of artifact, which are often computationally intensive. Recently, deep learning approaches have been proposed as computationally efficient and high performance alternatives. Unfortunately, in the current deep learning approaches, a dedicated neural network should be trained with matched training data for each specific artifact type. This poses a fundamental limitat…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Ultrasound (US) imaging is a fast and non-invasive imaging modality which is widely used for real-time clinical imaging applications without concerning about radiation hazard. Unfortunately, it often suffers from poor visual quality from various origins, such as speckle noises, blurring, multi-line acquisition (MLA), limited RF channels, small number of view angles for the case of plane wave imaging, etc. Classical methods to deal with these problems include image-domain signal processing approaches using various adaptive filtering and model-based approaches. Recently, deep learning approaches…
Twinkling Artifact is a valuable tool in detecting dense objects such as kidney stones, calculi etc., especially when there is no acoustic shadowing and presence of hyperechogenic tissues obstructs visualization. This phenomenon is not completely understood. Different scientific groups have contradictory findings concerning its properties: some of them observed a decrease in Twinkling intensity at elevated pulse repetition frequencies (PRF), while others found Twinkling to be independent from PRF, etc. In this paper we hypothesize that this kind of contradictions can be partially resolved on a…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；John Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）
Medical Ultrasound (US), despite its wide use, is characterized by artifacts and operator dependency. Those attributes hinder the gathering and utilization of US datasets for the training of Deep Neural Networks used for Computer-Assisted Intervention Systems. Data augmentation is commonly used to enhance model generalization and performance. However, common data augmentation techniques, such as affine transformations do not align with the physics of US and, when used carelessly can lead to unrealistic US images. To this end, we propose a set of physics-inspired transformations, including defo…
Ultrasound reflection tomography is widely used to image large complex specimens that are only accessible from a single side, such as well systems and nuclear power plant containment walls. Typical methods for inverting the measurement rely on delay-and-sum algorithms that rapidly produce reconstructions but with significant artifacts. Recently, model-based reconstruction approaches using a linear forward model have been shown to significantly improve image quality compared to the conventional approach. However, even these techniques result in artifacts for complex objects because of the inher…
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University Hospital Center (CHUV)（大学医院中心（CHUV））；University of Lausanne（洛桑大学）；Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM)（生物医学成像中心（CIBM））
Thanks to its capability of acquiring full-view frames at multiple kilohertz, ultrafast ultrasound imaging unlocked the analysis of rapidly changing physical phenomena in the human body, with pioneering applications such as ultrasensitive flow imaging in the cardiovascular system or shear-wave elastography. The accuracy achievable with these motion estimation techniques is strongly contingent upon two contradictory requirements: a high quality of consecutive frames and a high frame rate. Indeed, the image quality can usually be improved by increasing the number of steered ultrafast acquisition…
CP-UNet: Contour-based Probabilistic Model for Medical Ultrasound Images Segmentation
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application（天津认知计算与应用重点实验室）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking（天津先进网络重点实验室）；School of Future Technology, Tianjin University（天津大学未来技术学院）
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Automatically segmenting lesion area in breast ultrasound (BUS) images is a challenging one due to its noise, speckle and artifacts. Edge-map of BUS images also does not help because in most cases the edge-map gives no information whatsoever. Almost all segmentation technique takes the edge-map of the image as its first step, though there are a few algorithms that try to avoid edge-maps as well. Improving the edge-map of breast ultrasound images theoretically improves the chances of automatic segmentation to be more precise. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic technique of histogram spl…
Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
The cost-effectiveness and practical harmlessness of ultrasound imaging have made it one of the most widespread tools for medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, the beam-forming based image formation produces granular speckle noise, blurring, shading and other artifacts. To overcome these effects, the ultimate goal would be to reconstruct the tissue acoustic properties by solving a full wave propagation inverse problem. In this work, we make a step towards this goal, using Multi-Resolution Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). As a result, we are able to reconstruct CT-quality images from the reflec…
One of the biggest challenges for deep learning algorithms in medical image analysis is the indiscriminate mixing of image properties, e.g. artifacts and anatomy. These entangled image properties lead to a semantically redundant feature encoding for the relevant task and thus lead to poor generalization of deep learning algorithms. In this paper we propose a novel representation disentanglement method to extract semantically meaningful and generalizable features for different tasks within a multi-task learning framework. Deep neural networks are utilized to ensure that the encoded features are…
Medical ultrasound is widely used technique for diagnosing internal organs. As common artifacts, shadows often appear in ultrasound images. Detecting such shadows is curious because they prevent accurate diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel shadow detection method based on auto-encoding structure. It once separates an input image into a shadow image and a content image using two decoders and combines them to reconstruct the input. To lead the network into separating the input, we inject synthetic shadows into the input and make the network to predict them as the shadow image. Since we …
Ultrasound simulation based on ray tracing enables the synthesis of highly realistic images. It can provide an interactive environment for training sonographers as an educational tool. However, due to high computational demand, there is a trade-off between image quality and interactivity, potentially leading to sub-optimal results at interactive rates. In this work we introduce a deep learning approach based on adversarial training that mitigates this trade-off by improving the quality of simulated images with constant computation time. An image-to-image translation framework is utilized to tr…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；CHU Hospital（里昂大学医疗中心）
Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is an intra-operative imaging modality that facilitates observing and appraising the vessel wall structure of the human coronary arteries. Segmentation of arterial wall boundaries from the IVUS images is not only crucial for quantitative analysis of the vessel walls and plaque characteristics, but is also necessary for generating 3D reconstructed models of the artery. The aim of this study is twofold. Firstly, we investigate the feasibility of using a recently proposed region detector, namely Extremal Region of Extremum Level (EREL) to delineate the luminal and …
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；XuanWu Hospital, Capital Medical University（首都医科大学宣武医院）；Beijing Diagnostic Center of Vascular Ultrasound（北京血管超声诊断中心）
Carotid arteries vulnerable plaques are a crucial factor in the screening of atherosclerosis by ultrasound technique. However, the plaques are contaminated by various noises such as artifact, speckle noise, and manual segmentation may be time-consuming. This paper proposes an automatic convolutional neural network (CNN) method for plaque segmentation in carotid ultrasound images using a small dataset. First, a parallel network with three independent scale decoders is utilized as our base segmentation network, pyramid dilation convolutions are used to enlarge receptive fields in the three segme…
New York University（纽约大学）；Tandon School of Engineering, New York University（纽约大学坦登工程学院）；Riverside Research（河滨研究院）；Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University School of Medicine（纽约大学医学院斯基尔比尔分子医学研究所）
High-frequency ultrasound (HFU) is well suited for imaging embryonic mice in vivo because it is non-invasive and real-time. Manual segmentation of the brain ventricles (BVs) and whole body from 3D HFU images is time-consuming and requires specialized training. This paper presents a deep-learning-based segmentation pipeline which automates several time-consuming, repetitive tasks currently performed to study genetic mutations in developing mouse embryos. Namely, the pipeline accurately segments the BV and body regions in 3D HFU images of mouse embryos, despite significant challenges due to posi…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Prostate biopsy and image-guided treatment procedures are often performed under the guidance of ultrasound fused with magnetic resonance images (MRI). Accurate image fusion relies on accurate segmentation of the prostate on ultrasound images. Yet, the reduced signal-to-noise ratio and artifacts (e.g., speckle and shadowing) in ultrasound images limit the performance of automated prostate segmentation techniques and generalizing these methods to new image domains is inherently difficult. In this study, we address these challenges by introducing a novel 2.5D deep neural network for prostate segm…
Striving for Simplicity: Simple Yet Effective Prior-Aware Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；MedAI Technology (Wuxi) Co. Ltd.（MedAI科技（无锡）有限公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Fine-tuning a network which has been trained on a large dataset is an alternative to full training in order to overcome the problem of scarce and expensive data in medical applications. While the shallow layers of the network are usually kept unchanged, deeper layers are modified according to the new dataset. This approach may not work for ultrasound images due to their drastically different appearance. In this study, we investigated the effect of fine-tuning different layers of a U-Net which was trained on segmentation of natural images in breast ultrasound image segmentation. Tuning the cont…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Transfer learning (TL) for medical image segmentation helps deep learning models achieve more accurate performances when there are scarce medical images. This study focuses on completing segmentation of the ribs from lung ultrasound images and finding the best TL technique with U-Net, a convolutional neural network for precise and fast image segmentation. Two approaches of TL were used, using a pre-trained VGG16 model to build the U-Net (V-Unet) and pre-training U-Net network with grayscale natural salient object dataset (X-Unet). Visual results and dice coefficients (DICE) of the models were …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（启迪人工智能研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Jinan University（暨南大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Automatic breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound helps to diagnose breast cancer, which is one of the dreadful diseases that affect women globally. Segmenting breast regions accurately from ultrasound image is a challenging task due to the inherent speckle artifacts, blurry breast lesion boundaries, and inhomogeneous intensity distributions inside the breast lesion regions. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in medical image segmentation tasks. However, the convolutional operations in a CNN often focus on local regions, which suffer from limit…
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University Hospital Center (CHUV)（大学医院中心（CHUV））；University of Lausanne (UNIL)（洛桑大学）；CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging（CIBM生物医学成像中心）
Ultrafast ultrasound (US) revolutionized biomedical imaging with its capability of acquiring full-view frames at over 1 kHz, unlocking breakthrough modalities such as shear-wave elastography and functional US neuroimaging. Yet, it suffers from strong diffraction artifacts, mainly caused by grating lobes, side lobes, or edge waves. Multiple acquisitions are typically required to obtain a sufficient image quality, at the cost of a reduced frame rate. To answer the increasing demand for high-quality imaging from single unfocused acquisitions, we propose a two-step convolutional neural network (CN…
Collimated beam ultrasound systems are a novel technology for imaging inside multi-layered structures such as geothermal wells. Such systems include a transmitter and multiple receivers to capture reflected signals. Common algorithms for ultrasound reconstruction use delay-and-sum (DAS) approaches; these have low computational complexity but produce inaccurate images in the presence of complex structures and specialized geometries such as collimated beams. In this paper, we propose a multi-layer, ultrasonic, model-based iterative reconstruction algorithm designed for collimated beam systems. W…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；City, University of London（伦敦城市大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）
Automatic segmentation of the placenta in fetal ultrasound (US) is challenging due to the (i) high diversity of placenta appearance, (ii) the restricted quality in US resulting in highly variable reference annotations, and (iii) the limited field-of-view of US prohibiting whole placenta assessment at late gestation. In this work, we address these three challenges with a multi-task learning approach that combines the classification of placental location (e.g., anterior, posterior) and semantic placenta segmentation in a single convolutional neural network. Through the classification task the mo…
East Delta University（东三角洲大学）；University of Chittagong（吉大港大学）
Breast cancer has become a symbol of tremendous concern in the modern world, as it is one of the major causes of cancer mortality worldwide. In this regard, breast ultrasonography images are frequently utilized by doctors to diagnose breast cancer at an early stage. However, the complex artifacts and heavily noised breast ultrasonography images make diagnosis a great challenge. Furthermore, the ever-increasing number of patients being screened for breast cancer necessitates the use of automated end-to-end technology for highly accurate diagnosis at a low cost and in a short time. In this conce…
Volume visualization is a method that displays three-dimensional (3D) data in two-dimensional (2D) space. Using 3D datasets instead of 2D traditional images improves the visualization of anatomical structures, and volume visualization helps radiologists and surgeons to review large datasets comprehensively so that diagnosis and treatment can be enhanced. In liver surgery, blood vessel detection is important. Liver vessels have various shapes and due to the presence of noise in the ultrasound images, they can be confused with noise. Suboptimal images can sometimes lead to surgical errors where …
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院基础技术研究所）
Standard classification methods based on handcrafted morphological and texture features have achieved good performance in breast mass differentiation in ultrasound (US). In comparison to deep neural networks, commonly perceived as "black-box" models, classical techniques are based on features that have well-understood medical and physical interpretation. However, classifiers based on morphological features commonly underperform in the presence of the shadowing artifact and ill-defined mass borders, while texture based classifiers may fail when the US image is too noisy. Therefore, in practice …
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
Due to imaging artifacts and low signal-to-noise ratio in ultrasound images, automatic bone surface segmentation networks often produce fragmented predictions that can hinder the success of ultrasound-guided computer-assisted surgical procedures. Existing pixel-wise predictions often fail to capture the accurate topology of bone tissues due to a lack of supervision to enforce connectivity. In this work, we propose an orientation-guided graph convolutional network to improve connectivity while segmenting the bone surface. We also propose an additional supervision on the orientation of the bone …
For beamforming ultrasound (US) signals, typically a spatially constant speed-of-sound (SoS) is assumed to calculate delays. As SoS in tissue may vary relatively largely, this approximation may cause wavefront aberrations, thus degrading effective imaging resolution. In the literature, corrections have been proposed based on unidirectional SoS estimation or computationally-expensive a posteriori phase rectification. In this paper we demonstrate a direct delay correction approach for US beamforming, by leveraging 2D spatial SoS distribution estimates from plane-wave imaging. We show both in sim…
Removing speckle noise from medical ultrasound images while preserving image features without introducing artifact and distortion is a major challenge in ultrasound image restoration. In this paper, we propose a multiframe-based adaptive despeckling (MADS) algorithm to reconstruct a high-resolution B-mode image from raw radio-frequency (RF) data that is based on a multiple input single output (MISO) model. As a prior step to despeckling, the speckle pattern in each frame is estimated using a novel multiframe-based adaptive approach for ultrasonic speckle noise estimation (MSNE) based on a sing…
DCD: A Semantic Segmentation Model for Fetal Ultrasound Four-Chamber View
School of Information and Communication（信息与通信学院）；Guilin University of Electronic Technology（桂林电子科技大学）；Faculty of Humanities and Arts（人文艺术学院）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Machine Vision and Intelligent Control（广西机器视觉与智能控制重点实验室）；Wuzhou University（梧州大学）；Faculty of Innovation Engineering（创新工程学院）；Department of Public Education（公共教育系）；Wuzhou Medical College（梧州医学院）；College of Big Data and Software Engineering（大数据与软件工程学院）；Shenzhen Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital（深圳妇幼保健医院）；Southern Medical University（南方医科大学）；School of Microelectronics（微电子学院）
VibNet: Vibration-Boosted Needle Detection in Ultrasound Images
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Multi-scale Medical Robotics Centre（多尺度医疗机器人中心）；School of Medicine, Central Institute for Translational Cancer Research (TranslaTUM), Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学医学院、转化癌症研究中心（TranslaTUM））
MTCNet: Motion and Topology Consistency Guided Learning for Mitral Valve Segmentationin 4D Ultrasound
Medical Ultrasound Image Computing (MUSIC) Lab, School of Biomedical Engineering, Medical School, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China（医学超声图像计算（MUSIC）实验室，生物医学工程学院，医学院，深圳大学，深圳，中国）；Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China（武汉大学仁民医院，武汉，中国）；Centre for CIMIM, Manchester University, Manchester, UK（CIMIM中心，曼彻斯特大学，曼彻斯特，英国）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China（人工智能学院，深圳大学，深圳，中国）；National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data System Computing Technology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China（大数据系统计算技术国家工程实验室，深圳大学，深圳，中国）；School of Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China（生物医学工程与信息学院，南京医科大学，南京，中国）
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Ultromics Ltd.（Ultromics有限公司）
Accurate geometric quantification of the human heart is a key step in the diagnosis of numerous cardiac diseases, and in the management of cardiac patients. Ultrasound imaging is the primary modality for cardiac imaging, however acquisition requires high operator skill, and its interpretation and analysis is difficult due to artifacts. Reconstructing cardiac anatomy in 3D can enable discovery of new biomarkers and make imaging less dependent on operator expertise, however most ultrasound systems only have 2D imaging capabilities. We propose both a simple alteration to the Pix2Vox++ networks fo…
IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) is one of the most effective imaging modalities that provides assistance to experts in order to diagnose and treat cardiovascular diseases. We address a central problem in IVUS image analysis with Fully Convolutional Network (FCN): automatically delineate the lumen and media-adventitia borders in IVUS images, which is crucial to shorten the diagnosis process or benefits a faster and more accurate 3D reconstruction of the artery. Particularly, we propose an FCN architecture, called IVUS-Net, followed by a post-processing contour extraction step, in order to autom…
Deep Spatiotemporal Clutter Filtering of Transthoracic Echocardiographic Images: Leveraging Contextual Attention and Residual Learning
Cardiovascular Imaging and Dynamics, Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, KU Leuven（心血管影像与动力学，心血管科学系，KU莱顿大学）；Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Medicine, University of Minho（生命与健康科学研究所（ICVS），医学院，蒙德兹大学）；Ai–School of Technology, IPCA（2Ai技术学院，IPCA）；Department of Cardiac Technology, College of Applied Medical Sciences, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University（心脏技术系，应用医学科学学院，伊玛目阿卜杜勒拉赫曼·本·法伊兹大学）
