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超声成像技术最重要的进步之一。便携式超声扫描仪用于改善偏远地区和资源匮乏地区的保健服务，这些地区往往无法获得医院医疗设备。与医院的超声技术人员相比，这些扫描仪的使用者通常缺乏超声经验，也没有多少时间来调整扫描仪的控制。因此，简化控制是便携式超声系统的关键，特别是多普勒血流成像，这需要用户在扫描仪上选择相对较多的设置。我们的研究计划将通过建立我们团队最近发明的一种自动方法来调整多普勒超声扫描仪的控制设置来解决这个问题。到目前为止，该方法已通过在血管网络的理想物理模型中成像流来证明。本研究的目标是：(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中遇到的更具挑战性的血流条件下可靠地工作；(2)改进我们的软件实现方法，使其能够在临床上使用的超声扫描仪上操作；(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，准备商业化。发现基金还将在每年的研究项目中为至少三名工程或医学物理学专业的研究生和一名本科生提供多普勒成像技术的专业培训。

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.