In vivo Adaptive Focusing for Clinical Contrast-Enhanced Transcranial Ultrasound Imaging in Human

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive aberration correction method for transcranial ultrasound imaging that significantly improves image quality and microbubble detection in human brain vasculature, enabling better diagnosis of cerebrovascular conditions.

Contribution

The study presents a novel adaptive aberration correction technique based on microbubble backscattered signals, enhancing transcranial ultrasound imaging through challenging skull windows.

Findings

Ultrafast Doppler contrast increased by 4dB on average.

Number of microbubble tracks detected increased by 38%.

Improved imaging quality in difficult skull windows.

Abstract

Imaging the human brain vasculature with high spatial and temporal resolution remains challenging in the clinic today. Transcranial ultrasound is scarcely used for cerebrovascular imaging, due to low sensitivity and strong phase aberrations induced by the skull bone that only enable major brain vessel imaging, even with ultrasound contrast agent injection (microbubbles). Here, we propose an adaptive aberration correction technique for skull bone aberrations based on the backscattered signals coming from intravenously injected microbubbles. Our aberration correction technique was implemented to image brain vasculature in adult humans through temporal and occipital bone windows. For each patient, an effective speed of sound, as well as a phase aberration profile, were determined in several isoplanatic patches spread across the image. This information was then used in the beamforming process. It improved image quality both for ultrafast Doppler imaging and Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM), especially in cases of thick bone windows. For ultrafast Doppler images, the contrast was increased by 4dB on average, and for ULM, the number of detected microbubble tracks was increased by 38%. This technique is thus promising for better diagnosis and follow-up of brain pathologies such as aneurysms or stroke and could make transcranial ultrasound imaging possible even in particularly difficult-to-image patients.