Does contrast ultrasound dispersion imaging reveal changes in vascular tortuosity? A comparison with acoustic angiography

Higher microvascular density with tortuous and irregular vessels are hallmarks of cancer vasculature. These alterations can be captured by contrast ultrasound dispersion imaging (CUDI) and acoustic angiography (AA) at different scales: CUDI aims at obtaining an implicit measure of structural alteration by determining the dispersion kinetics of contrast agents. At a smaller scale, AA images the vascular architecture by detecting the high-frequency components generated with ultrasound contrast agents (UCA). This work shows the performance of these techniques by imaging cancerous and control regions in 3 rat xenograft models. Furthermore, it investigates the diagnostic value of the vascular features extracted using CUDI and AA with the aim to answer the question: does CUDI reveal changes in vascular tortuosity? Notes: This article was mistakenly omitted from the original submission to IEEE Xplore. It is now included as part of the conference record.