High-resolution and high-sensitivity blood flow estimation using optimization approaches with application to vascularization imaging

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of high-resolution flow estimation in medical ultrasound images. Imaging methods based on ultrafast sequences associated with adaptive spatiotemporal SVD clutter filtering have recently improved blood flow detection. Herein, we investigate a new way of addressing the clutter filtering problem in order to obtain a high-resolution flow estimation, through solving an inverse problem corresponding to both deconvolution and robust principal component analysis. Applied to tissue vascularization imaging via power Doppler images, the proposed method highlights finer details on experimental data compared to existing approaches.