Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging of the Heart

Abstract

Ultrafast ultrasound imaging of the heart has emerged in recent years, enabling measurement oftransient dynamics inside the heart, such as myocardial deformation, electromechanical waves,and chamber blood flow. However, existing transthoracic ultrafast ultrasound imaging techniquesare based on pulsed and unfocused ultrasound waves for significance increase in frame rates, andtherefore they suffer from limited sonographic signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and penetration due tothe insufficient delivery of ultrasound waves through the chest wall to interrogate the entire heart.In this talk, I will introduce our latest development of an unprecedented ultrafast ultrasoundcascaded-wave synthetic aperture (CaSA) imaging method, whose core is a specially-encodedtransmission and reception model, to achieve superior SNR and thus greater penetration at framerates higher than 3000 frames per second to map myocardial motion and chamber blood flow withhigh quality.