IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2020 Dec;67(12):2553-2564. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2020.3018424. Epub 2020 Nov 24.

Deep Network for Scatterer Distribution Estimation for Ultrasound Image Simulation.

IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control

Lin Zhang, Valery Vishnevskiy, Orcun Goksel

PMID: 32822295 DOI: 10.1109/TUFFC.2020.3018424

Abstract

Simulation-based ultrasound (US) training can be an essential educational tool. Realistic US image appearance with typical speckle texture can be modeled as convolution of a point spread function with point scatterers representing tissue microstructure. Such scatterer distribution, however, is in general not known and its estimation for a given tissue type is fundamentally an ill-posed inverse problem. In this article, we demonstrate a convolutional neural network approach for probabilistic scatterer estimation from observed US data. We herein propose to impose a known statistical distribution on scatterers and learn the mapping between US image and distribution parameter map by training a convolutional neural network on synthetic images. In comparison with several existing approaches, we demonstrate in numerical simulations and with in vivo images that the synthesized images from scatterer representations estimated with our approach closely match the observations with varying acquisition parameters such as compression and rotation of the imaged domain.

Publication Types

• Journal Article
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't