Relaxing Super Localization Frame Rate Requirements Utilizing a Novel 2D Interpolation Technique

Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) by-passes the conventional diffraction limit, allowing the imaging of the vasculature at a microscopic resolution through precise localization of intravenously injected microbubbles. Thanks to their resolution, ULM generated images hold the promise to be the next diagnostic frontier for diseases that modify the vascular structure, such as cancer. However, deploying ULM in clinical settings is currently limited by the prolonged acquisition times and high frame rates needed. To relax the high frame rate requirement, we propose a new time-efficient ULM (TEULM) pipeline. The proposed TEULM introduces the radial basis functions (RBFs) as interpolators upstream of the ULM framework, to recover the missing information consequence of a reduced frame rate. We test TEULM using in vivo Rat’s Brain and Kidney datasets acquired at a high frame rate (1 KHz). The results confirm the ability of TEULM to reconstruct super-resolution (SR) images with a similarity score (Dice score) of 80% for both datasets when simulating a frame rate acquisition of 100 Hz; i.e., we can relax the frame rate requirement for ULM by a factor 10 while keeping the SR image quality acceptable.