High Frame Rate Ultrasound Imaging by Means of Tensor Completion: Application to Echocardiography

High frame rate ultrasound imaging enables the monitoring of fast-moving organs. In echocardiography, this is especially needed due to the existence of rapidly moving structures, such as the heart valves. In the last two decades, various methods have been proposed to improve the frame rate. Here we propose a novel method, based on binary coding patterns (BCPs) and tensor completion (TC), to increase the temporal resolution (i.e., frame rate) in the pre-processing stage of conventional focused ultrasound imaging. The rationale behind our proposal is to perform, at first, the beamforming of a fraction of the scan lines, randomly selected in each frame based on BCP. Then, we reconstruct the missing scan lines through TC. The latter is an effective technique for recovering missing information from a low-rank tensor, based on a small number of observations using rank minimization. Following our approach, reducing the transmissions events needed to generate an image, the frame rate is increased by the same proportion. We have applied the proposed technique to a pre-beamformed radio-frequency echocardiographic dataset. Our results show that we can improve the frame rate by a factor from 3 to 4, while keeping the structural similarity of the reconstructed tensor and the original one at values higher than 0.98.