Temporal Super-resolution of Ultrasound Imaging Using Matrix Completion

Abstract

The temporal super-resolution of the dynamic ultrasound imaging, a means to observe rapid heart movements, is considered an important subject in medical diagnosis of cardiac conditions. Here, a new technique based on the acquisition scheme using the matrix completion (MC) theory is offered for the temporal super-resolution of the two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging. MC mentions the problem of completing a low-rank matrix when only a subset of its elements can be observed. Here, the lower scan lines are acquired. Whereby, the proposed method uses temporal and spatial information of the radio frequency (RF) image sequences for the reconstruction of skipped RF lines. This is performed using the construction of the MC images and then reconstruction of them by the MC theory. The results of the proposed method are compared with the compressive sensing (CS) reconstruction methods. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations of 2D and 3D data demonstrate that in the proposed method, which uses the spatial and temporal relation of RF images and the MC theory, the reconstruction is more accurate, and the reconstruction error is lower. The computational complexity of this method is very low. It also does not require hardware adjustments. Therefore, it can be easily implemented in current ultrasound-imaging devices with the frame-rate enhancement. For instance, the frame rate up to two times the original sequence is feasible using the proposed methods, while root mean square error is decreased by about 35% and 30% for 2D and 3D data, respectively, compared with the CS reconstruction method.