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High dynamic range ultrasound imaging

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a popular computational photography technique that has found its way into every modern smartphone and camera. In HDR imaging, images acquired at different exposures are combined to increase the luminance range of the final image, thereby extending the limited dynamic range of the camera. Ultrasound imaging suffers from limited dynamic range as well; at higher power levels, the hyperechogenic tissue is overexposed, whereas at lower power levels, hypoechogenic tissue details are not visible. In this work, we apply HDR techniques to ultrasound imaging, where we combine ultrasound images acquired at different power levels to improve the level of detail visible in the final image.

Methods

Ultrasound images of ex vivo and in vivo tissue are acquired at different acoustic power levels and then combined to generate HDR ultrasound (HDR-US) images. The performance of five tone mapping operators is quantitatively evaluated using a similarity metric to determine the most suitable mapping for HDR-US imaging.

Results

The ex vivo and in vivo results demonstrated that HDR-US imaging enables visualizing both hyper- and hypoechogenic tissue at once in a single image. The Durand tone mapping operator preserved the most amount of detail across the dynamic range.

Conclusions

Our results strongly suggest that HDR-US imaging can improve the utility of ultrasound in image-based diagnosis and procedure guidance.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Neil Tenenholtz, Ph.D. for insightful discussions, and Yashraj Narang, Richard Nuckols, Ph.D. and Mohsen Moradi Dalvand, Ph.D. for their help with data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Alperen Degirmenci, Douglas P. Perrin & Robert D. Howe

  2. Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Children’s Hospital Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Douglas P. Perrin

Authors
  1. Alperen Degirmenci
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  2. Douglas P. Perrin
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  3. Robert D. Howe
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Alperen Degirmenci or Robert D. Howe.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health under Grant NIH 1R21EB018938, Toyota Motor North America Inc., and the NVIDIA Corporation Academic Hardware Grant Program.

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Degirmenci, A., Perrin, D.P. & Howe, R.D. High dynamic range ultrasound imaging. Int J CARS 13, 721–729 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-018-1729-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-018-1729-3

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