Abstract
Plane-wave ultrasound contrast imaging offers a faster, less destructive means for
imaging microbubbles compared with traditional ultrasound imaging. Even though many
of the most acoustically responsive microbubbles have resonant frequencies in the
lower-megahertz range, higher frequencies (>3 MHz) have typically been employed to
achieve high spatial resolution. In this work we implement and optimize low-frequency
(1.5-4 MHz) plane-wave pulse inversion imaging on a commercial, phased-array imaging
transducer in vitro and illustrate its use in vivo by imaging a mouse xenograft model. We found that the 1.8-MHz contrast signal was
about four times that acquired at 3.1 MHz on matched probes and nine times greater
than echoes received on a higher-frequency probe. Low-frequency imaging was also much
more resilient to motion. In vivo, we could identify sub-millimeter vasculature inside a xenograft tumor model and easily
assess microbubble half-life. Our results indicate that low-frequency imaging can
provide better signal-to-noise because it generates stronger non-linear responses.
Combined with high-speed plane-wave imaging, this method could open the door to super-resolution
imaging at depth, while high power pulses could be used for image-guided therapeutics.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: July 26, 2018
Accepted:
May 24,
2018
Received in revised form:
May 23,
2018
Received:
August 14,
2017
Identification
Copyright
© 2018 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology. All rights reserved.
