Automated Optimization of Doppler Ultrasound Acquisition Parameters for Quantitative Vascular Imaging

笔记本电脑大小的便携式超声系统的发明是过去十年来超声成像技术最重大的进步之一。便携式超声波扫描仪用于改善偏远和低资源环境中的卫生保健服务，在这些环境中，基于医院的医疗设备往往无法获得。与医院的超声技术员相比，这些扫描仪的用户通常没有超声经验，调整扫描仪控制的时间也更少。因此，便携式超声系统迫切需要简化的控制，特别是对于多普勒血流成像，这需要用户在扫描仪上选择相对大量的设置。我们的研究计划将在我们团队最近发明的一种自动方法的基础上解决这个问题，以调整多普勒超声扫描仪的控制设置。到目前为止，该方法已经通过对血管网络的理想化物理模型中的流动进行成像来演示。建议研究的目标是(1)加强我们的多普勒调谐方法的理论基础，使其能够在活体受试者遇到的更具挑战性的流动条件下可靠地执行；(2)改进我们的方法的软件实现，使其准备好在临床使用的超声扫描仪上操作；以及(3)扩展该方法，使其可以应用于其他超声和光学多普勒血流成像技术。拟议的研究将产生我们的多普勒调谐方法的软件版本，准备好商业化。Discovery Grant还将在研究计划的每一年为至少三名工程或医学物理专业的研究生和一名本科生提供多普勒成像技术方面的专门培训。

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.