Parametric perfusion imaging based on low-cost ultrasound platform.

In this study, we attempted to implement parametric perfusion imaging to quantify blood perfusion based on modified low-cost ultrasound platform. A novel ultrasound contrast-specific imaging method called pulse-inversion harmonic sum-squared-differences (PIHSSD) was proposed for improving the sensitivity for detecting contrast agents and the accuracy of parametric perfusion imaging, which combined pulse-inversion harmonic (PIH) with pulse-inversion sum-squared-differences (PISSD) threshold-based decision. PIHSSD method just involved simple operations including addition and multiplication and was easy to realize. The sequences of contrast images without logarithmic compression were used to acquire time intensity curves (TICs) from numerous equal-sized regions-of-interest (ROI) covering the entire image plane. Parametric perfusion images were obtained based on the parameters extracted from the TICs, including peak value (PV), area under curve (AUC), mean transit time (MTT), peak value time (PVT), peak width (PW) and climbing rate (CR). Flow phantom was used for validation and the results suggested that PIHSSD method provided 9.6 to 20.3 dB higher contrast-to-tissue ratio (CTR) than PIH method. The results of the experiments of rabbit kidney also showed that the CTR of PIHSSD images was higher than that of PIH images, and the parametric perfusion images based on PIHSSD method provided more accurate quantification of blood perfusion compared with those based on PIH and PISSD methods. It demonstrated that the parametric perfusion imaging achieved good performance though implemented on low-cost ultrasound platform. (E-mail: mxwan@mail.xjtu.edu.cn).