Ultrasound Plane-Wave Compressed Sensing Reconstruction Method Using Intra-frame and Inter-frame Joint Multi-hypothesis and Reference Frame Multi-hypothesis Predictions.

Objective: Ultrasound plane-wave imaging has the advantage of high frame rate in addition to high data volume. High data sampling rates and large amounts of data storage can become bottlenecks in ultrasound system design. Although compressed sensing technology can help reduce the burden of sampling and transmission, it achieves relatively low image quality because of its reliance solely on signal sparsity. Therefore, we proposed reconstructing the ultrasound signal by applying additional prior knowledge, such as plane-wave imaging and its echo characteristics.

Methods: Inspired by multi-hypothesis prediction methods in video compression coding, the plane-wave multi-hypothesis prediction compressed sensing reconstruction method was proposed to improve the accuracy of reconstructions. We applied multi-hypothesis prediction and residual reconstruction on the plane wave to enhance the quality of reconstruction and correct predicted values. Also, to acquire high-quality hypotheses, two hypothesis acquisition schemes were evaluated, constructing search windows on both preceding and subsequent frames as well as the reference frame.

Results: Compared with traditional reconstruction methods that rely on sparsity, multi-hypothesis prediction compressed sensing methods can reduce signal reconstruction errors and significantly eliminate image artifacts. Furthermore, by using improved hypotheses, signal reconstruction and image quality can be enhanced, resulting in higher contrast.

Conclusion: Comparative simulation experimental results based on the publicly available Plane-Wave Imaging Challenge in Medical Ultrasound (PICMUS) and acoustic radiation force imaging data sets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other methods in both reconstruction errors and image quality. This helps to reduce the complexity of sampling and transmission of the ultrasound system.