A Paired Point-of-Care Ultrasound Dataset for Image Quality Enhancement and Benchmarking via a cGAN Baseline

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel paired dataset of low-end POCUS and high-end ultrasound images, and demonstrates a deep learning framework that significantly enhances ultrasound image quality, aiding diagnostics in resource-limited settings.

Contribution

The work provides the first publicly available paired dataset and a cGAN-based method for improving POCUS image quality, surpassing previous approaches.

Findings

SSIM improved from 0.29 to 0.54

PSNR increased from 19.16 dB to 22.41 dB

Image quality metrics NIQE and PIQE showed substantial improvement

Abstract

Purpose: We aim to enhance the image quality of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) devices using deep learning and a novel paired dataset of POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. Approach: We collected the first accurately paired dataset using a custom-built automated gantry system of low-end POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. A conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) was utilized based on the pix2pix architecture, with a U-Net generator that incorporates both L1 and structural similarity index (SSIM) losses to improve perceptual quality. Pretraining on a simulation dataset further boosts performance. Evaluation was performed on 1064 paired ex vivo tissue and phantom ultrasound image sets. Results: Our approach improves the SSIM from 0.29 to 0.54 and PSNR from 19.16 dB to 22.41 dB. No-reference metrics also indicate substantial enhancement, with the Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) and Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQE) scores dropping from 7.95 to 4.44 and 31.12 to 19.99, respectively. Conclusions: This work presents the first publicly available accurately paired dataset of low-end POCUS to high end ultrasound images. Additionally, our results demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework to overcome hardware limitations of handheld POCUS, enhancing its diagnostic value in low-resource and point-of-care settings. The POCUS-IQ Dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/NKI-MedTech-AI/POCUS-IQ.