Compressed sensing reconstruction of 3D ultrasound data using dictionary learning

In this paper we propose a compressed sensing (CS) method adapted to 3D ultrasound imaging (US). In contrast to previous work, we propose a new approach based on the use of learned overcomplete dictionaries. Such dictionaries allow for much sparser representations of the signals since they are optimized for a particular class of images such as US images. We will investigate two undersampling patterns of the 3D US imaging: a spatially uniform random acquisition and a line-wise random acquisition. The latter being extremely interesting for 3D imaging: it would indeed allow skipping the acquisition of many lines among the several thousands required in 3D acquisitions, thus, speeding up the whole acquisition process and incrementing the imaging rate. In this study, the dictionary was learned using the K-SVD algorithm on patches extracted from a training dataset constituted of simulated 3D non-log envelope US volumes. Experiments were performed on a testing dataset made of a simulated 3D US log-envelope volume not included in the testing dataset. CS reconstruction was performed by removing 20% to 80% of the original samples according to the two undersampling patterns. Reconstructions using a K-SVD dictionary previously trained dictionary indicate minimal information loss, thus showing the potential of the overcomplete dictionaries.