Real-time visualization of pulsatile tissue-motion in B-mode ultrasonogram for assistance in bedside diagnosis of ischemic diseases of neonatal cranium

摘要

By developing a real-time visualization system, pulsatile tissue-motion caused by artery pulsation of blood flow has been visualized continuously from a video stream of ultrasonogram in brightness mode. The system concurrently executes the three processes: (1) capturing an input B-mode video stream (640x480 pixels/frame, 30 fps) into a ring buffer of 256 frames, (2) detecting intensity and phase of pulsatile tissue-motion at each pixel from a heartbeat-frequency component in Fourier transform of a series of pixel value through the latest 64 frames as a function of time, and (3) generating an output video-stream of pulsatile-phase image, in which the motion phase is superimposed as color gradation on an input video-stream when the motion intensity exceeds a proper threshold. By optimizing the visualization software with the streaming SIMD extensions, the pulsatile-phase image has been continuously updated at more than 10 fps, which was enough to observe pulsatile tissue-motion in real time. Compared to the retrospective technique, the real-time visualization had clear advantages not only in enabling bedside observation and quick snapshot of pulsatile tissue-motion but also in giving useful feedback to probe handling for avoiding unwanted motion-artifacts, which may strongly assist pediatricians in bedside diagnosis of ischemic diseases.