Key result
CDW ultrasound imaging reduces carotid flow velocity error ~2.7-fold vs conventional plane wave imaging.
Why the study?
Cascaded Dual-polarity Waves imaging increases SNR potentially enabling velocity vector imaging in challenging conditions, but blood motion between pulse trains influences decoding.
CDW ultrasound imaging significantly improves the signal-to-noise ratio and velocity vector estimation in challenging acoustic conditions, which may facilitate better non-invasive assessment of carotid artery hemodynamics in deeper vessels.
May enhance low-SNR carotid VVI; leaves open clinical translation pending human trials.
Cascaded Dual-polarity Waves (CDW) imaging increases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by transmitting trains of pulses with different polarity order, which are combined via decoding afterwards. This potentially enables velocity vector imaging (VVI) in more challenging SNR conditions. However, the motion of blood in between the trains will influence the decoding process. In this work, the use of CDW for blood VVI is evaluated for the first time. Dual-angle, plane wave ultrasound, CDW-coded and non-coded (conventional Plane Wave, cPW), was acquired using a 7.8 MHz linear array at a pulse repetition frequency of 8 kHz. CDW-channel data were decoded prior to beamforming and cross-correlation-based compound speckle tracking for VVI. Simulations of single scatterer motion show a high dependence of amplitude gain on the velocity magnitude and direction for CDW-coded transmissions. Both simulations and experiments of parabolic flow show increased SNRs for CDW imaging. As a result, CDW outperforms cPW VVI in low SNR conditions, based on both bias and standard deviation. Quantitative linear regression and qualitative analyses of simulated realistic carotid artery blood flow show a similar performance of CDW and cPW for high SNR (14 dB) conditions. However, reducing the SNR to 6 dB, results in a root-mean-squared error 2.7 times larger for cPW versus CDW, and an R2of 0.4 versus 0.9. Initial in vivo evaluation of a healthy carotid artery shows increased SNR and more reliable velocity estimates for CDW versus cPW. In conclusion, this work demonstrates that CDW imaging facilitates improved VVI of deeper located carotid arteries.
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Bakker et al. (2024) studied Healthy (volunteer) / Technical evaluation of ultrasound imaging (n=1). Cascaded Dual-polarity Waves (CDW) ultrasound vs. Conventional plane wave (cPW) ultrasound was evaluated on Velocity vector estimation accuracy (root-mean-squared error at 6 dB SNR) and signal-to-noise ratio. Cascaded Dual-polarity Waves (CDW) imaging outperformed conventional plane wave imaging in low signal-to-noise ratio conditions, demonstrating a 2.7 times smaller root-mean-squared error for simulated realistic carotid flow.
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