Ultrafast contrast enhanced ultrasound for imaging and quantifying flow and tissue perfusion

血流和灌注的成像和量化对一系列重大疾病的诊断和治疗至关重要，包括冠心病、瓣膜性心脏病、颈动脉、大脑和周围血管疾病、癌症和慢性炎症，所有这些疾病都表现为血流和灌注异常。现有的成像和量化技术有许多局限性。超声成像是临床应用最广泛的影像学方法之一，具有安全、实时、成本低、可及性好等优点。超快超声技术的最新进展可以将超声成像速度提高两个数量级，并在非对比增强超声应用方面取得了令人兴奋的进展，包括软组织弹性成像、脑功能成像和心脏成像。如果结合使用微泡造影剂的对比增强超声（CEUS）的进展，超快技术有可能将造影剂的显著性提高10倍，并大大扩展可通过超声跟踪的视野或血流动态范围；这些迄今为止尚未实现的改进可能会极大地影响成像和量化血流和灌注的能力。在这个项目中，我们建议基于我们在微泡造影剂成像方面的广泛研究经验，为此目的开发和评估新的超快速超声造影方法和系统。它们有可能成为临床前和临床血流和组织灌注成像的下一代超声工具，在准确性、信噪比、灵敏度、特异性和分辨率方面具有前所未有的性能。

Imaging and quantifying blood flow and perfusion are critical to the diagnosis and management of a range of major diseases including coronary heart disease, valvular heart disease, carotid, cerebral and peripheral vascular diseases, cancer, and chronic inflammation, all of which manifest themselves with abnormalities in flow and perfusion. Existing imaging and quantification techniques have numerous limitations. Ultrasound imaging is one of the most widely used clinical imaging methods, offering safety, real-time imaging, low cost and excellent accessibility. Recent advances in ultrafast ultrasound techniques can increase ultrasound imaging speed by up to two orders of magnitude and have resulted in exciting developments in non-contrast enhanced ultrasound applications, including soft tissue elastography, brain functional imaging and cardiac imaging. If combined with advances in contrast enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) using microbubble contrast agents, the ultrafast techniques have the potential to improve the conspicuity of the contrast agent by up to 10 times and greatly extend the field of view or the dynamic range of blood flows that can be tracked through ultrasound; these hitherto unrealised improvements could dramatically impact the ability to image and quantify flow and perfusion. In this project we propose to develop and evaluate novel ultrafast CEUS methodologies and systems for this purpose, building on our extensive research experiences on microbubble contrast agent imaging. They have the potential to become the next generation ultrasound tools for pre-clinical and clinical imaging of blood flow and tissue perfusion, giving unprecedented performance in terms of accuracy, SNR, sensitivity, specificity and resolution.