High frame rate contrast enhanced echocardiography: Microbubbles stability and contrast evaluation

Abstract

Contrast Echocardiography (CE) with microbubble contrast agents have significantly advanced our capability in assessing cardiac function, including myocardium perfusion imaging and quantification. However in conventional CE techniques with line by line scanning, the frame rate is limited to tens of frames per second and image quality is low. Recent works in high frame-rate (HFR) ultrasound have shown significant improvement of the frame rate. The aim of this work is to investigate the MBs stability and the contrast improvement using HFR CE compared to CE transmission at an echocardiography relevant frequency for different mechanical indices (MIs). Our results show that the contrast and bubble destruction of HFR CE and standard CEUS varies differently as a function of space and MIs. At low MIs, HFR CE shows a similar behavior as focused CE with little MB destruction, and generates better CTR (up to 3 folds). As MI increases, the MB destruction is more significant for HFR CE with a reduction of the CTR.