Deep Power-Aware Tunable Weighting for Ultrasound Microvascular Imaging

Ultrasound microvascular imaging (UMI), including ultrafast power Doppler imaging (uPDI) and ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM), obtains blood flow information through plane wave (PW) transmissions at high frame rates. However, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of PWs causes low image quality. Adaptive beamformers have been proposed to suppress noise energy to achieve higher image quality accompanied by increasing computational complexity. Deep learning (DL) leverages powerful hardware capabilities to enable rapid implementation of noise suppression at the cost of flexibility. To enhance the applicability of DL-based methods, in this work, we propose a deep power-aware tunable (DPT) weighting (i.e., postfilter) for delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming to improve UMI by enhancing PW images. The model, called Yformer, is a hybrid structure combining convolution and Transformer. With the DAS beamformed and compounded envelope image as input, Yformer can estimate both noise power and signal power. Furthermore, we utilize the obtained powers to compute pixel-wise weights by introducing a tunable noise control factor (NCF), which is tailored for improving the quality of different UMI applications. In vivo experiments on the rat brain demonstrate that Yformer can accurately estimate the powers of noise and signal with the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) higher than 0.95. The performance of the DPT weighting is comparable to that of superior adaptive beamformer in uPDI with low computational cost. The DPT weighting was then applied to four different datasets of ULM, including public simulation, public rat brain, private rat brain, and private rat liver datasets, showing excellent generalizability using the model trained by the private rat brain dataset only. In particular, our method indirectly improves the resolution of liver ULM from 25.24 to $18.77~\mu $ m by highlighting small vessels. In addition, the DPT weighting exhibits more details of blood vessels with faster processing, which has the potential to facilitate the clinical applications of high-quality UMI.