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The impact of monodisperse microbubble size on contrast-enhanced ultrasound super-localization imaging

Peiran Chen, Andreas Pollet, S. Turco, Miguel de Vargas, L. T. Te Winkel, W. van Hoeve, J. D. den Toonder, H. Wijkstra et al.

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2025

6 citations

Abstract

Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) super-localization imaging has shown promise for the assessment of microvascular networks by localizing and tracking microbubbles. The size of the available microbubbles for clinical use is polydisperse, but size-tailorable monodisperse microbubbles are now being developed that present a narrow size distribution. Therefore, proper frequency and pressure tuning have the potential to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and resolution of CEUS acquisitions, which can be expected to increase the performance of CEUS super-localization imaging. In this work, the impact of monodisperse microbubble size on CEUS imaging quality and the efficacy of super-localization imaging was investigated by jointly tuning different frequencies and pressures for different monodisperse microbubble size when performing in vitro CEUS imaging of microbubbles flowing through a dedicated sugar-printed dual-bifurcation microvasculature phantom. The obtained CEUS acquisitions were then post-processed to generate a super-localization output using the Gaussian-centroid localization approach. Four metrics, including generalized contrast-to-noise ratio, full-width half-maximum, number of localization events, and localization F1-score, were employed to quantify the CEUS imaging quality and super-localization performance. In general, jointly optimizing the transmit frequency and pressure for monodisperse microbubbles with smaller size leads to improved CEUS imaging and better…

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