Automated Optimization of Doppler Ultrasound Acquisition Parameters for Quantitative Vascular Imaging

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The invention of laptop-computer-sized portable ultrasound systems is one of the most significant advances in ultrasound imaging technology over the past decade. Portable ultrasound scanners are used to improve health-care delivery in remote and low-resource settings where hospital-based medical equipment is often inaccessible. The users of these scanners usually have less ultrasound experience and less time available to adjust the scanner's controls than would a hospital-based ultrasound technician. Therefore, simplified controls are critically needed for portable ultrasound systems, especially for Doppler blood-flow imaging, which requires the user to choose a relatively large number of settings on the scanner. Our research program will address this problem by building upon our team's recent invention of an automatic method to tune the control settings of Doppler ultrasound scanners. The method has been demonstrated thus far by imaging flow in an idealized physical model of a vessel network. The goals of the proposed research are to (1) strengthen the theoretical foundation of our Doppler tuning method to enable it to perform reliably under the more challenging flow conditions encountered in live subjects, (2) improve our software implementation of the method to prepare it to operate onboard clinically used ultrasound scanners, and (3) extend the method so it can be applied to additional ultrasonic and optical Doppler blood-flow imaging technologies. The proposed research will produce software versions of our Doppler tuning method that are ready for commercialization. The Discovery Grant also will provide specialized training in Doppler imaging technology for at least three graduate and one undergraduate students in engineering or medical physics during each year of the research program.