A Uniform Multi-mode Fused Framework for Velocity Field Estimation in Ultrasound Imaging
摘要
Velocity field estimation, or motion tracking, is the key to characterizing tissue function in ultrasound imaging. Current velocity field estimation remains challenging in cross-range motion tracking due to the less sensitivity of ultrasound in this dimension. In addition, there is a lack of a uniform framework for different imaging schemes, such as linear array with rectangular scanning, phased array with sector scanning, and matrix array with volumetric scanning. This paper proposes a uniform multi-mode fused framework for tissue velocity field estimation. This framework integrates multiple modes of pair-wise optical flows, Doppler, and speckle consistency in ultrasound to improve the accuracy of cross-range velocity estimation. Furthermore, the uniform framework is adapted to different arrays and imaging schemes for various application scenarios. Extensive in-silico experiments on homemade and public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the outperformance of our method when compared with a window-based method and an energy function optimization-based method. Particularly, our method improves the accuracy of cross-range velocity estimation by 8.84%, 19.21%, and 10.94% in three cross-sectional views of the public cardiac dataset when compared with the energy function optimization-based method.