Yi Zeng;Shixiao W. Jiang;Hui Zhu;Jinwei Li;Jianfeng Li;Fei Li;Shukuan Lu;Xiran Cai
{"title":"High-Quality Passive Acoustic Mapping With the Cross-Correlated Angular Spectrum Method","authors":"Yi Zeng;Shixiao W. Jiang;Hui Zhu;Jinwei Li;Jianfeng Li;Fei Li;Shukuan Lu;Xiran Cai","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3586460","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3586460","url":null,"abstract":"While passive acoustic mapping (PAM) has been advanced for monitoring acoustic cavitation activity in focused ultrasound (FUS) therapy, achieving both real-time and high-quality imaging capabilities is still challenging. The angular spectrum (AS) method presents the most efficient algorithm for PAM, but it suffers from artifacts and low resolution due to the diffraction pattern of the imaging array. Data-adaptive beamformers suppress artifacts well, but their overwhelming computational complexity, more than two orders of magnitude higher than the classical time exposure acoustic (TEA) method, hinders their application in real time. In this work, we introduce the cross-correlated AS method to address the challenge. This method is based on cross-correlating the AS back-propagated wave fields, in the frequency domain (FD), measured by different apodized subapertures of the transducer array to provide the normalized cross-correlation coefficient (NCC) matrix for artifacts suppression. We observed that the spatial pattern of NCC matrix is variable, which can be utilized by the triple apodization with cross correlation (TAX) with AS scheme, namely, the AS-TAX method, for optimal artifacts suppression outcomes. Both the phantom and mouse tumor experiments showed that: 1) the AS-TAX method has comparable image quality as the data-adaptive beamformers, reducing the energy spread area (ESA) by 34.8%–65.0% and improving image signal-to-noise ratio (ISNR) by 10.6–14.4 dB compared to TEA; 2) it reduces the computational complexity by two orders of magnitude compared to TEA allowing millisecond-level image reconstruction speed with a parallel implementation; and 3) it can well map microbubble cavitation activity of different status (stable or inertial). The AS-TAX method represents a real-time approach to monitor cavitation-based FUS therapy with high image quality.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 10","pages":"1352-1363"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11072264","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144583813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Real-Time 3-D Passive Acoustic Mapping for Row-Column Arrays With the Cross-Spectrum Method","authors":"Hui Zhu;Yi Zeng;Jianfeng Li;Kailiang Xu;Xiran Cai","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3585301","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3585301","url":null,"abstract":"Real-time and 3-D monitoring of cavitation activity is critical for safe, effective, and controlled treatments in cavitation-based focused ultrasound (FUS) therapies. This 3-D monitoring capability is essential for detecting off-target cavitation events, particularly in at-risk structures and those occurring outside the plane of 2-D imaging. In this work, we demonstrate that using row-column arrays (RCAs) for 3-D passive acoustic mapping (PAM), which can be easily integrated into commercial ultrasound scanners compared to using hemispherical arrays or matrix arrays, represents a potent solution. For that, we propose the RCA-PAM method for image formation. This method deploys the angular spectrum (AS) method to back-propagate 3-D harmonic wave fields using the passively received cavitation signals by the RCA’s row and column apertures, respectively. Then, the 3-D PAM volume is obtained by integrating the cross-spectrum of the two wave fields over a selected bandwidth. To further reduce image artifacts, we combine AS with dual-apodization with cross correlation (AS-DAX) for wave field propagation. Our experiments showed that RCA-PAM achieved 0.04±0.07 mm source localization error and comparable image quality to the ones reconstructed for the matrix array (same aperture size). We realized over 40 volumes/second reconstruction speed for a volume sized <inline-formula> <tex-math>$128,times , 128,times ,250$ </tex-math></inline-formula> voxels, using all frequency components in the RCA’s working bandwidth. We also demonstrate the seamless combination of RCA-PAM and B-mode imaging using the same RCA for 3-D monitoring of MB cavitation activity in a mouse tumor model. In summary, the use of RCAs for cavitation monitoring represents a promising avenue to minimize treatment risks in cavitation-based FUS therapies.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 9","pages":"1187-1198"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144553398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Publication Information","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3577872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3577872","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 7","pages":"C2-C2"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11061184","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144536376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Arthur Floquet;Emmanuel Soubies;Duong-Hung Pham;Denis Kouame
{"title":"Spatially Variant Ultrasound Image Restoration With Product Convolution","authors":"Arthur Floquet;Emmanuel Soubies;Duong-Hung Pham;Denis Kouame","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3584533","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3584533","url":null,"abstract":"The process of ultrasound (US) image formation can generally be modeled, using a linear and shift invariance approximation, as a convolution. In practice, the point spread function (PSF) is shift-variant. Here, we consider the restoration problem using a shift-variant PSF, where it is modeled as a product convolution. We argue that the US PSF varies smoothly enough for product convolution to serve as an efficient and effective direct model for US image restoration. We present a strategy for constructing the product-convolution operator and derive an efficient optimization scheme. We finally validate our approach on both simulated and real data, demonstrating state-of-the-art results while achieving significantly faster processing times.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 9","pages":"1235-1244"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144527728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Vivo Ultrasound Dynamic Coronary Blood Flow Imaging Through Adaptive Frame Selection Method","authors":"Deng-Yan Zhuang;Hsin Huang;Wei-Ting Chang;Chih-Chung Huang","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3582154","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3582154","url":null,"abstract":"Use of ultrasound for coronary imaging in commercial echocardiography remains challenging because of the small nature of coronary vasculature and the myocardium’s intricate motion. Several super-resolution imaging techniques have been applied for coronary imaging; however, most of them only measure the coronary flow during the diastolic phase and have a long data acquisition time. To address these problems, this study proposes an adaptive frame selection approach for coronary vasculature imaging. In this approach, similar frames within cardiac cycles are selected using the sum of absolute difference (SAD) algorithm, and the coronary vasculature blood flow is calculated without using electrocardiographic (ECG) gating data. Experiments were performed in mouse hearts through high-frequency ultrafast ultrasound imaging. After similar frames were selected from several cardiac cycles (one-five cycles), a singular value decomposition (SVD) filter was applied to extract blood flow signals and obtain a dynamic coronary vasculature image, the accuracy of which was confirmed by measuring Doppler sonograms from the left coronary artery (LCA) and arterioles. The conventional method (without SAD), in which only blood flow in the diastolic phase is calculated, was also conducted to enable a comparison in terms of measured vessel size and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The SNR for the proposed approach was found to be <inline-formula> <tex-math>$20.74~pm ~1.62$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB, under the best parameter settings. The proposed approach was successfully verified in the small animal model and has potential for use in human dynamic coronary artery imaging.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 8","pages":"1108-1118"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144496099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Simulation, Design, and Characterization of a Large Divergent Element Sparse Array (LDESA) for 3-D Ultrasound Imaging","authors":"Jean-Baptiste Jacquet;Jean-Luc Guey;Pierre Kauffmann;Mohamed Tamraoui;Emmanuel Roux;Barbara Nicolas;Etienne Coffy;Hervé Liebgott","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3583178","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3583178","url":null,"abstract":"Sparse arrays address the complexity of manufacturing large 2-D arrays. However, they usually suffer from a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to their small element size. The large divergent element (LDE) technology overcomes this limitation by simultaneously having a large emitting area and a large angular aperture. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility of imaging in B-mode using the LDE sparse array (LDESA), that is, increasing the sparse array SNR without noteworthy impact on contrast. This article provides the simulation, the design, and an experimental characterization of a 1-MHz LDESA. Simulations are performed using the angular impulse response-based ultrasound simulation (AIRUS), providing coupled image-transducer optimizations of LDESA designs. Probe parameters, including probe diameter, layout, LDE size, and electroacoustic response, are optimized to maximize the contrast ratio (CR). The final layout is a 100-mm-diameter Fermat spiral covered by 256 LDEs. Each LDE is 3.5 mm wide in diameter and experimentally reaches an angular aperture of 75° at −6 dB in echo. The transmit focused beam is 1° wide and steerable up to 60° with an amplitude loss of only 10 dB. The array exhibits a 2.2-mm lateral resolution and a 1.8-mm axial resolution in a wire experiment.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 8","pages":"1041-1052"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144496100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hassan Nahas;Billy Y. S. Yiu;Adrian J. Y. Chee;Takuro Ishii;Alfred C. H. Yu
{"title":"Bedside Ultrasound Vector Doppler Imaging System With GPU Processing and Deep Learning","authors":"Hassan Nahas;Billy Y. S. Yiu;Adrian J. Y. Chee;Takuro Ishii;Alfred C. H. Yu","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3582773","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3582773","url":null,"abstract":"Recent innovations in vector flow imaging promise to bring the modality closer to clinical application and allow for more comprehensive, high frame-rate vascular assessments. One such innovation is plane-wave multi-angle vector Doppler, where pulsed Doppler principles from multiple steering angles are used to realize vector flow imaging at frame rates upward of 1000 frames per second (fps). Currently, vector Doppler is limited by the presence of aliasing artifacts that have prevented its reliable realization at the bedside. In this work, we present a new aliasing-resistant vector Doppler imaging system that can be deployed at the bedside using a programmable ultrasound core, graphics processing unit (GPU) processing, and deep-learning principles. The framework supports two operational modes: 1) live imaging at 17 fps, where vector flow imaging serves to guide image view navigation in blood vessels with complex dynamics, and 2) on-demand replay mode, where flow data acquired at high frame rates of over 1000 fps is depicted as a slow-motion playback at 60 fps using an aliasing-resistant vector projectile visualization. Using with our new system, aliasing-free vector flow cineloops were successfully obtained in a stenosis phantom experiment and in human bifurcation imaging scans. This system represents a major engineering advance toward the clinical adoption of vector flow imaging.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 8","pages":"1079-1094"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11049011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144484163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Self-Supervised Optimization of RF Data Coherence for Improving Breast Reflection UCT Reconstruction","authors":"Lei He;Zhaohui Liu;Yuxin Cai;Qiude Zhang;Liang Zhou;Jing Yuan;Yang Xu;Mingyue Ding;Ming Yuchi;Wu Qiu","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3581915","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3581915","url":null,"abstract":"The reflection ultrasound computed tomography (UCT) is gaining prominence as an essential instrument for breast cancer screening. However, reflection UCT quality is often compromised by the variability in sound speed across breast tissue. Traditionally, reflection UCT utilizes the delay-and-sum (DAS) algorithm, where the time of flight (TOF) significantly affects the coherence of the reflected radio frequency (RF) data, based on an oversimplified assumption of uniform sound speed. This study introduces three meticulously engineered modules that leverage the spatial correlation of receiving arrays to improve the coherence of RF data and enable more effective summation. These modules include the self-supervised blind RF data segment block (BSegB) and the state-space model-based strong reflection prediction (SSM-SRP) block, followed by a polarity-based adaptive replacing refinement (PARR) strategy to suppress sidelobe noise caused by aperture narrowing. To assess the effectiveness of our method, we utilized standard image quality metrics, including peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and root mean squared error (RMSE). In addition, coherence factor (CF) and variance (Var) were employed to verify the method’s ability to enhance signal coherence at the RF data level. The findings reveal that our approach greatly improves performance, achieving an average PSNR of 19.64 dB, an average SSIM of 0.71, and an average RMSE of 0.10, notably under conditions of sparse transmission. The conducted experimental analyses affirm the superior performance of our framework compared to alternative enhancement strategies, including adaptive beamforming methods and deep learning-based beamforming approaches.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 8","pages":"1147-1159"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144475011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shichao Jia;Hanmu Guo;Roderick Y. H. Lim;Soichiro Tsujino
{"title":"Surface-Acoustic-Wave-Driven Acoustic Tweezing in a Silicon Microfluidic Chip","authors":"Shichao Jia;Hanmu Guo;Roderick Y. H. Lim;Soichiro Tsujino","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3581642","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3581642","url":null,"abstract":"Surface-acoustic-wave (SAW)-driven acoustic tweezers (ATs) have been widely explored for high-resolution ultrasonic sample manipulation. Among these, hybrid ATs comprising a reusable SAW chip and a disposable glass or silicon microfluidic (MF) chip as a superstrate offer advantages such as reduced experimental costs and minimized cross-contamination between experiments. However, maximizing the acoustic pressure within the MF channel requires efficient acoustic coupling between the SAW and the MF structure. In this work, we investigate the frequency-dependent characteristics of acoustophoresis of 50-MHz hybrid ATs composed of an SAW chip and a silicon MF chip. We elucidate the role of the bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonances in the silicon substrate in facilitating the formation of acoustic standing waves (SWs) within the MF channel. The experimental results demonstrate the generation of acoustic pressures up to <inline-formula> <tex-math>$2.1~pm ~0.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> MPa inside the channel. The fabricated device was successfully used to probe the transient viscoelastic deformation of HEK293T cells and to trap motile cells Tetrahymena. These findings highlight the potential of the proposed hybrid ATs as a platform for acousto-mechanical testing of soft matter and biological samples.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 8","pages":"1005-1014"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144336491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Complementary Coded Multiplane Wave Sequences for SNR Increase in Ultrafast Power Doppler Ultrasound Imaging","authors":"Tamraoui Mohamed;Adeline Bernard;Roux Emannuel;Liebgott Hervé","doi":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3581350","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TUFFC.2025.3581350","url":null,"abstract":"Power Doppler imaging is a commonly used technique for visualizing blood flow in ultrasound imaging. This technique measures flow amplitude rather than velocity, and it relies on detecting the power of Doppler signals, making it particularly useful for detecting weak blood flow. The emergence of coherent plane wave (PW) compounding has enabled significant progress in ultrafast power Doppler imaging. However, the lack of transmit focusing leads to a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast, thereby reducing the sensitivity to blood flow, particularly in deep tissue regions. We propose to increase the SNR and contrast of ultrafast power Doppler imaging by leveraging the ideal correlation properties of complete complementary codes (CCC) for multi-PW imaging (MPWI). The MPWI with CCC (MPWI-CCC) method consists of transmitting quasisimultaneously N tilted PWs coded with a binary sequence of length L. Subsequently, the backscattered signals from each PW are individually recovered with high amplitude through decoding. We compared MPWI-CCC and multiplane wave imaging with Hadamard encoding (MPWI-HD) against coherent PW compounding (CPWC) in both simulations and experiments. When transmitting four PWs on a commercial blood flow phantom, MPWI-CCC exhibited the SNR and contrast gains of 13.02 and 10.08 dB, respectively, compared to CPWC. MPWI-HD, on the other hand, achieved gains of only 6.99 and 4.29 dB, respectively.","PeriodicalId":13322,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control","volume":"72 9","pages":"1256-1271"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144333032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}