Fast Alternating Radial Beamforming for Speed-of-Sound Imaging Based on Apparent Speckle Shifts

Pulse-echo speed-of-sound (SoS) imaging based on minute misalignments between consecutively acquired ultrasound images traditionally relies on images beamformed on Cartesian grids. Existing SoS imaging developments do not allow for real-time imaging and typically do not prioritize feasibility in conventional ultrasound systems that have limited resources and rigid processing structures. In this work, we propose a resource-efficient approach based on radial beamforming with virtual source transmits for implementation within an on-the-fly beamformer. We also introduce alternating transmissions with fast pair-alternating beamforming for motion-robust displacement tracking with typical line-based beamformers. We tested these methods comparatively on numerical simulations, tissue-mimicking phantom experiments, and in vivo data from breast lesion examinations. We demonstrate that the proposed radial grid beamforming approach performs comparably to a Cartesian grid approach, while allowing implementation on standard hardware for beamforming. Our proposed sequences would allow for SoS data acquisition frame rates of more than 20 fps in parallel to conventional B-mode imaging. The proposed speckle-shift based radial approach with fast alternation between congruent beamforming lines is a major step towards real-time SoS imaging on standard ultrasound systems with moderate resources.

Uncertainty Estimation for Trust Attribution to Speed-of-Sound Reconstruction with Variational Networks

Speed-of-sound (SoS) is a biomechanical characteristic of tissue, and its imaging can provide a promising biomarker for diagnosis. Reconstructing SoS images from ultrasound acquisitions can be cast as a limited-angle computed-tomography problem, with Variational Networks being a promising model-based deep learning solution. Some acquired data frames may, however, get corrupted by noise due to, e.g., motion, lack of contact, and acoustic shadows, which in turn negatively affects the resulting SoS reconstructions. We propose to use the uncertainty in SoS reconstructions to attribute trust to each individual acquired frame. Given multiple acquisitions, we then use an uncertainty based automatic selection among these retrospectively, to improve diagnostic decisions. We investigate uncertainty estimation based on Monte Carlo Dropout and Bayesian Variational Inference. We assess our automatic frame selection method for differential diagnosis of breast cancer, distinguishing between benign fibroadenoma and malignant carcinoma. We evaluate 21 lesions classified as BI-RADS~4, which represents suspicious cases for probable malignancy. The most trustworthy frame among four acquisitions of each lesion was identified using uncertainty based criteria. Selecting a frame informed by uncertainty achieved an area under curve of 76% and 80% for Monte Carlo Dropout and Bayesian Variational Inference, respectively, superior to any uncertainty-uninformed baselines with the best one achieving 64%. A novel use of uncertainty estimation is proposed for selecting one of multiple data acquisitions for further processing and decision making.

Robust Imaging of Speed-of-Sound Using Virtual Source Transmission

Speed-of-sound (SoS) is a novel imaging biomarker for assessing biomechanical characteristics of soft tissues. SoS imaging in pulse-echo mode using conventional ultrasound systems with hand-held transducers has the potential to enable new clinical uses. Recent work demonstrated diverging waves from single-element (SE) transmits to outperform plane-wave sequences. However, single-element transmits have severely limited power and hence produce low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in echo data. We herein propose Walsh-Hadamard (WH) coded and virtual-source (VS) transmit sequences for improved SNR in SoS imaging. We additionally present an iterative method of estimating beamforming SoS in the medium, which otherwise confound SoS reconstructions due to beamforming inaccuracies in the images used for reconstruction. Through numerical simulations, phantom experiments, and in-vivo imaging data, we show that WH is not robust against motion, which is often unavoidable in clinical imaging scenarios. Our proposed virtual-source sequence is shown to provide the highest SoS reconstruction performance, especially robust to motion artifacts. In phantom experiments, despite having a comparable SoS root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 17.5 to 18.0 m/s at rest, with a minor axial probe motion of ~0.67 mm/s the RMSE for SE, WH, and VS already deteriorate to 20.2, 105.4, 19.0 m/s, respectively; showing that WH produces unacceptable results, not robust to motion. In the clinical data, the high SNR and motion-resilience of VS sequence is seen to yield superior contrast compared to SE and WH sequences.