Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology最新文献

{"title":"Acoustic Cavitation Emissions Predict Near-complete/complete Histotripsy Treatment in Soft Tissues","authors":"Scott C. Haskell ,&nbsp;Ellen Yeats ,&nbsp;Jiaqi Shi ,&nbsp;Tim Hall ,&nbsp;J. Brian Fowlkes ,&nbsp;Zhen Xu ,&nbsp;Jonathan R. Sukovich","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Objective</h3><div>Histotripsy is a non-invasive acoustic ablation technique that leverages cavitation to impart mechanical damage to a viscoelastic medium, such as tissue. Although histotripsy bubbles and lesions can be imaged with a variety of modalities, reliable methods to predict tissue disruption across different tissue-types remain to be determined.</div></div><div><h3>Approach</h3><div>Several ex-vivo bovine tissues were ablated by intrinsic threshold histotripsy over a range of pulse-per-location acoustic doses. Acoustic Cavitation Emission (ACE) signals were captured following every other therapeutic pulse using transmit-receive capable histotripsy arrays. Final bubble lifespan, lifespan-slope, and percent-reduction were calculated and correlated against histologic necrosis score (0-5: 0=0% necrosis, 5=&gt;95% necrosis) and residual structure score (0-4: 0=none present, 4=intact) to evaluate the ability of features from ACE-signals to predict histotripsy-induced damage. Further, optimal ACE-feature thresholds were determined for binary evaluation of whether a necrosis score equal or greater than 4 had been reached.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>Measured lifespans increased and lifespan-slopes decreased with pulses per location (ppl) and eventually plateaued in all tissue types, in similar trends to those previously observed in tissue phantoms. Necrosis score increased and residual structure decreased with increasing acoustic dose. Bubble lifespan-slope and percent-reduction correlated well with necrosis score. Thresholds able to predict the necrosis score of 4 or greater in brain, liver, and kidney were calculated with high sensitivity/specificity (&gt;80%). The necrosis score of 4 and 5 is expected to correspond to near-complete/complete ablation by histological evaluation.</div></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><div>Features measured from ACE-signals, particularly the lifespan-slope and percent reduction, were used to predict near-complete/complete ablation of large-volume histotripsy treatments in ex vivo bovine liver, kidney, and brain tissues with good accuracy. Tissue heterogeneities were observed to impact the histotripsy damage and corresponding ACE-signals, and thus the predication accuracy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 909-920"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143524888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Quantitative Analysis of Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Images of Brain-Dead Donor Livers: Prediction of Early Allograft Dysfunction","authors":"Jiao Sun ,&nbsp;Xiuyun Ren ,&nbsp;Di Zhang ,&nbsp;Zizhen Yang ,&nbsp;Xiaodong Wu ,&nbsp;Chuanshen Xu ,&nbsp;Jinzhen Cai ,&nbsp;Jianhong Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2024.11.018","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2024.11.018","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Objective</h3><div>To determine the CEUS parameters that predict the likelihood of postoperative EAD.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>Clinical and imaging data for 75 pairs of donors and recipients collected between September 2022 and July 2023 were retrospectively analyzed. Subjects were divided into those with early allograft dysfunction (EAD) and those without EAD. The liver parenchyma was selected as the region of interest to plot the CEUS time–intensity curve. CEUS parameters were compared between the two groups.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>Peak intensity, area under the curve (AUC), and cholinesterase values were significantly lower in the EAD group than in the non-EAD group. The hepatic arterial–portal arrival interval (APAI) and aspartate aminotransferase level were significantly higher in the EAD group. Multivariate logistic analysis identified the APAI to be an independent risk factor for EAD (odds ratio 0.755; 95% confidence interval 0.577–0.989; <em>p</em> = 0.041). Receiver-operating characteristic curve analysis showed that the prediction probability P, which represents a combination of CEUS and clinical data, was best able to predict EAD (AUC 0.802; 95% confidence interval 0.679–0.926; <em>p</em> &lt; 0.0001). Comparison of the AUC for prediction probability P and each single parameter identified statistically significant differences between the predicted probability P and aspartate aminotransferase and cholinesterase values (<em>p</em> = 0.042 and <em>p</em> = 0.020, respectively).</div></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><div>A longer APAI can be used as a biomarker to predict EAD after brain-dead donor liver transplantation. CEUS could be a valuable tool for assessment of donor livers and identifying recipients potentially at risk of developing postoperative EAD.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 735-741"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143469711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SegFormer3D: Improving the Robustness of Deep Learning Model-Based Image Segmentation in Ultrasound Volumes of the Pediatric Hip","authors":"Benjamin Hers ,&nbsp;Maria Bonta ,&nbsp;Siyi Du ,&nbsp;Kishore Mulpuri ,&nbsp;Emily K. Schaeffer ,&nbsp;Antony J. Hodgson ,&nbsp;Rafeef Garbi","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2024.12.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2024.12.013","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is a painful orthopedic malformation diagnosed at birth in 1–3% of all newborns. Left untreated, DDH can lead to significant morbidity including long-term disability. Currently the condition is clinically diagnosed using 2-D ultrasound (US) imaging acquired between 0 and 6 mo of age. DDH metrics are manually extracted by highly trained radiologists through manual measurements of relevant anatomy from the 2-D US data, which remains a time-consuming and highly error-prone process. Recently, it was shown that combining 3-D US imaging with deep learning-based automated diagnostic tools may significantly improve accuracy and reduce variability in measuring DDH metrics. However, the robustness of current techniques remains insufficient for reliable deployment into real-life clinical workflows. In this work, we first present a quantitative robustness evaluation of the state of the art in bone segmentation from 3-D US and demonstrate examples of failed or implausible segmentations with convolutional neural network and vision transformer models under common data variations, e.g., small changes in image resolution or anatomical field of view from those encountered in the training data. Second, we propose a 3-D extension of SegFormer architecture, a lightweight transformer-based model with hierarchically structured encoders producing multi-scale features, which we show to concurrently improve accuracy and robustness. Quantitative results on clinical data from pediatric patients in the test set showed up to 0.9% improvement in Dice score and up to a 3% smaller Hausdorff distance 95% compared with state of the art when unseen variations in anatomical structures and data resolutions were introduced.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 751-758"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143469724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dual-Frequency Subharmonic Ultrasound Contrast Imaging for Non-Invasive Blood Pressure Measurement","authors":"Sander Spiekhout ,&nbsp;Jason Voorneveld ,&nbsp;Nico de Jong ,&nbsp;Johannes G. Bosch","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.01.015","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.01.015","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Here we propose an ultrasound contrast-based imaging method that enables non-invasive quantitative assessment of ambient pressure changes inside the body (such as blood pressure). We subject the microbubbles in the contrast agent to two frequencies: A low-frequency (57 kHz) signal that dynamically manipulates the ambient pressure, and a series of high-frequency (4 MHz) pulses for exciting and imaging the bubble response. The imaging pulses exploit the ambient pressure sensitivity of the subharmonic microbubble response, while the low-frequency signal provided an intrinsic calibration for measurement of ambient pressure changes. We tested this approach in an <em>in vitro</em> setup and show that it can visualize and quantify ambient pressure differences with a sensitivity of 0.5 dB/kPa.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 870-876"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143460412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ultrasound Image Velocimetry for High Spatiotemporal Resolution Blood Flow Velocity Field Mapping in Mice","authors":"Mingyi Tang ,&nbsp;Yu-Qing Zhou ,&nbsp;Mark C. Blaser ,&nbsp;David A. Steinman ,&nbsp;Craig A. Simmons","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.01.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.01.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Objective</h3><div>Abnormal hemodynamics is thought to play an essential role in the development of cardiovascular diseases. Mouse models are widely used for elucidating the underlying mechanisms; however, their small size and high heart rates make it difficult to perform quantitative flow velocity field mapping with sufficient temporal resolution. Our objective was to develop a noninvasive method for quantitative flow field mapping in mice based on speckle-tracking from high-frequency ultrasound B-mode imaging.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>Ultrasound ECG-gated kilohertz visualization (EKV) was performed on a mouse-aorta-sized tubular flow phantom at frame rates up to 10,000 fps. Unexpected velocity underestimations were elucidated by simulating EKV reconstruction and performing ultrasound image velocimetry (UIV) in silico. A technique for error correction was developed and validated in vitro, and demonstrated in vivo.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>In flow phantoms, EKV-UIV underestimated velocity in the beam lateral direction by 50%–70%. This was attributed to loss of speckle contiguity owing to EKV's retrospective strip-based reconstruction of the two-dimensional B-mode image. The proposed correction technique reduced the errors to &lt;10% by accounting only for speckle movement within each image strip. A preliminary in vivo study showed that vortex shapes and near-wall expansion movement inside a mouse left ventricle were more aligned with physical expectations after correction.</div></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><div>A novel technique was developed to quantitatively map blood flow with high spatiotemporal resolution. Further optimization will enable longitudinal studies in mice to gain insights on the role of local hemodynamic forces in the development of cardiovascular diseases.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 841-851"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143460416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SDRD-Net: A Symmetric Dual-branch Residual Dense Network for OCT and US Image Fusion","authors":"Zhang Xiao ,&nbsp;Bin He ,&nbsp;Zhiyi Chen ,&nbsp;Rushu Peng ,&nbsp;Qinghao Zeng","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Ultrasound (US) images have the advantages of no radiation, high penetration, and real-time imaging, and optical coherence tomography (OCT) has the advantage of high resolution. The purpose of fusing endometrial images from optical coherence tomography (OCT) and ultrasound (US) is to combine the advantages of different modalities to ultimately obtain more complete information on endometrial thickness. To better integrate multimodal images, we first proposed a Symmetric Dual-branch Residual Dense (SDRD-Net) network for OCT and US endometrial image fusion. Firstly, using Multi-scale Residual Dense Blocks (MRDB) to extract shallow features of different modalities. Then, the Base Transformer Module (BTM) and Detail Extraction Module (DEM) are used to extract primary and advanced features. Finally, the primary and advanced features are decomposed and recombined through the Feature Fusion Module (FMM), and the fused image is output. We have conducted experiments across both private and public datasets, encompassing IVF and MIF tasks, achieving commendable results.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 884-895"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143434153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Bi-modal Temporal Segmentation Network for Automated Segmentation of Focal Liver Lesions in Dynamic Contrast-enhanced Ultrasound","authors":"Yu Duan ,&nbsp;Siyuan Shi ,&nbsp;Haiyi Long ,&nbsp;Xian Zhong ,&nbsp;Yang Tan ,&nbsp;Guangjian Liu ,&nbsp;Guanghua Wu ,&nbsp;Si Qin ,&nbsp;Xiaoyan Xie ,&nbsp;Manxia Lin","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2024.12.014","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2024.12.014","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Objective</h3><div>To develop and validate an automated deep learning-based model for focal liver lesion (FLL) segmentation in a dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) video.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>In this multi-center and retrospective study, patients with FLL who underwent dynamic CEUS exam were included from September 2021 to December 2021 (model development and internal test sets), and from March 2023 to May 2023 (external test sets). A bi-modal temporal segmentation network (BTS-Net) was developed and its performance was evaluated using Dice score, intersection over union (IoU) and Hausdorff distance, and compared against several segmentation methods. Time-intensity curves (TICs) were obtained automatically from BTS-Net and manually de-lineated by an experienced radiologist, and evaluated by intra-class correlation and Pearson correlation co-efficients. Multiple characteristics were analyzed to evaluate the influencing factors of BTS-Net.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>A total of 232 patients (160 men, median age 56 y) with single FLL were enrolled. BTS-Net achieved mean Dice scores of 0.78, 0.74 and 0.80, mean IoUs of 0.67, 0.62 and 0.68, and mean Hausdorff distances of 15.83, 16.01 and 15.04 in the internal test set and two external test sets, respectively. The mean intra-class correlation and Pearson correlation co-efficients of TIC were 0.89, 0.92 and 0.98, and 0.91, 0.93 and 0.99, respectively. BTS-Net demonstrated a significantly higher mean Dice score and IoU in large (0.82, 0.72), homogeneous positive enhanced (0.81, 0.70) or stable (0.81, 0.70) lesions in pooled test sets.</div></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><div>Our study proposed BTS-Net for automated FLL segmentation of dynamic CEUS video, achieving favorable performance in the test sets. Downstream TIC generation based on BTS-Net performed well, demonstrating its potential as an effective segmentation tool in clinical practice.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 759-767"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143425985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editorial Advisory Board","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/S0301-5629(25)00043-2","DOIUrl":"10.1016/S0301-5629(25)00043-2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 4","pages":"Page i"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143422734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Use of the Ultrasound Bone Maturity Indexes to Assess Whether Children Have Reached Their Final Height","authors":"Yumiao Qiao,&nbsp;Pin Lv,&nbsp;Kai Hong,&nbsp;Ying Zhao,&nbsp;Qunqun Feng,&nbsp;Chao Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Objective</h3><div>Ultrasound bone maturity indexes were used to assess whether children had reached their final height.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>The follow-up study was performed between January 2022 and August 2024. Ultrasound bone maturity indexes, including the ossification ratio of the radius, ulna, and femur, and skeletal maturity score (SMS, the sum of the ossification ratio of the above three bones multiplied by 100), were collected from medical records, along with the children's age and height. The children were followed up to ascertain the annual increase in height during the 2 years before and after the ultrasound bone age assessment. Children were grouped according to whether they had reached their final height. The diagnostic performance (area under the curve, AUC) of ultrasound bone maturity indexes in assessing whether the children had reached their final height was confirmed.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>A total of 120 children (60 boys) with a mean age of 15.0 ± 1.7 years for boys and 14.1 ± 2.0 years for girls were included. At the attainment of final height, the mean values of radial, ulnar, and femoral ossification ratios, as well as the SMS, were 90%, 84%, 98%, and 271 in boys and 86%, 83%, 98%, and 267 in girls, respectively. Ultrasound bone maturity indexes were able to assess whether children had reached their final height, with the highest AUC for SMS of 0.99 (95% CI: 0.97, 1.01, cutoff value, 256) in boys and 0.95 (95% CI: 0.90, 1.00, cutoff value, 260) in girls.</div></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><div>A child's height stops increasing before the ossification ratios of the bones reach 100%. Ultrasound bone maturity indexes, especially SMS, demonstrate high diagnostic performance in determining whether children have reached their final height.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 5","pages":"Pages 903-908"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143426188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reply to the Letter to the Editor From Professor Yu Du","authors":"Meiying Yan,&nbsp;Chen Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2025.02.003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49399,"journal":{"name":"Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology","volume":"51 6","pages":"Pages 1028-1029"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143425971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}