2-tier in-plane motion correction and out-of-plane motion filtering for contrast-enhanced ultrasound.

摘要

The 2-tier sequential IPMC and adaptive OPMF significantly reduced motion in 3-minute CEUS cines of FLLs, thereby overcoming the challenges of drift and irregular breathing motion in long cines. The 2-tier IPMC strategy provided stable motion correction tolerant of out-of-plane motion throughout the cine by sequentially registering subreference frames that bypassed the motion cycles, thereby overcoming the lack of a nearly stationary reference point in long cines. Out-of-plane motion filter reduced apparent motion by adaptively removing frames imaged off-plane from the automatically selected OPMF reference frame, thereby tolerating nonuniform breathing motion. Selection of the best OPMF by minimizing OPMM effectively reduced motion under a wide variety of motion patterns applicable to clinical CEUS. These semiautomated processes only required user input for region-of-interest selection and can improve the accuracy of quantitative perfusion measurements.