Title
A low complexity scheme for accurate 3D velocity estimation in ultrasound systems
Abstract
Vector flow imaging is a critical component in the clinical diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases; however, most current methods are too computationally expensive to scale well to 3D. Less complex techniques, such as Doppler-based imaging (which cannot provide lateral flow measurements) and basic speckle tracking algorithms (which have poor lateral accuracy), are incapable of producing high quality 3D measurements. In this paper, we first extend a technique designed to improve lateral flow accuracy for 2D velocity vector estimation, the synthetic lateral phase method, to 3D (SLP-3D). We then show that a straightforward implementation of this algorithm is too computationally complex for modern systems. Instead, we propose a two-tiered method that uses low complexity sum-of-absolute differences (SAD) for coarse-grained search and an optimized version of SLP-3D to fine tune the search for sub-pixel accuracy. We show that the proposed method (SAD+SLP-3Dopt) achieves a 9× reduction in computational complexity compared to the naive SLP-3D. Field II simulations for plug and parabolic flow using our method show a fairly high degree of accuracy in both the axial and the lateral components. Finally, we show our technique can support accurate flow imaging with up to 130 velocity estimations/sec within the power constraints of a handheld device.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/SiPS.2014.6986067
SiPS
Keywords
Field
DocType
sad+slp-3dopt,diseases,velocity measurement,plug flow,cardiovascular diseases,biomedical ultrasonics,parabolic flow,ultrasound system,synthetic lateral phase method,field ii simulations,doppler-based imaging,cardiovascular system,computational complexity,sum-of-absolute differences,3d velocity estimation,speckle tracking algorithms,coarse-grained search,clinical diagnosis,low complexity scheme,medical image processing,2d velocity vector estimation,vector flow imaging,imaging,accuracy,estimation,correlation,kernel
Speckle pattern,Computer science,Real-time computing,Artificial intelligence,Kernel (linear algebra),Computer vision,Flow (psychology),Algorithm,Vector flow,Velocity estimation,Parabola,Computational complexity theory,Ultrasound
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.43
2
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Siyuan Wei1305.91
Ming Yang2305.23
Chaitali Chakrabarti31978184.17
Richard Sampson4346.01
Thomas F. Wenisch52112105.25
Oliver Kripfgans612.12
J. Brian Fowlkes7516.71