Abstract
Very high frame rate ultrasound imaging has enabled the development of novel imaging modalities such as the functional imaging of the brain, cardiac electrophysiology, and the quantitative real-time imaging of the intrinsic mechanical properties of tumors, to name a few. We present here the extension of Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging in three dimensions based on the use of either diverging or plane waves emanating from a sparse virtual array located behind the probe. High contrast and resolution were achieved while maintaining imaging rates of thousands of volumes per second. A customized portable ultrasound system was developed to sample 1024 independent channels and to drive a 32X32 matrix-array probe. Its capability to track in 3D transient phenomena occurring in the millisecond range within a single ultrafast acquisition was demonstrated for 3-D Shear-Wave Imaging, 4-D Ultrafast Doppler Imaging, and 4D vector flow imaging. These results demonstrate the potential of 4-D Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging for the volumetric real-time mapping of stiffness, tissue motion and flow in humans in vivo and promises new clinical quantitative applications of ultrasound with reduced intra- and inter-observer variability.
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