Transcranial Ultrasound Imaging with Estimating the Geometry, Position and Wave-Speed of Temporal Bone

Abstract

Transcranial ultrasound imaging is a suitable technology for diagnosis of strokes as it is safe, portable, relatively inexpensive and available in emergency medicine services, however it currently offers poor image quality due to the phase aberration caused by the human skull. In this work, we evaluate an approach for two-dimensional transcranial ultrasound imaging through the temporal window of a sagittally-cut human skull using the commercial P4-1 phased-array probe, where the position and true geometry of the bone layer is estimated for accurate phase aberration correction. The medium is described with four layers (probe lens, soft tissue, skull, soft tissue). A synthetic aperture imaging scheme is used as the transmission of spherical wave-fronts facilitates the modeling of refraction. First, the bidirectional headwave method estimates the compressional wave-speed in the temporal bone. Next, a fast marching method calculates the travel times between individual array elements and image pixels to be used with delay-and-sum reconstruction algorithm. Sound speed maps are generated with adaptive beamforming including the successive segmentation of the near and far surfaces of the cortical bone layer. The proposed method reconstructs the scatterers with an average lateral and axial localization error of about 1.25 mm and 0.37 mm, compared to the ground truth, respectively. In average, it improves the contrast ratio and lateral resolution by 7 dB and 36%, compared to the conventional method, respectively.