Medical ultrasound imaging is a technique that has become much more prevalent than other medical imaging techniques since it is more accessible, less expensive, safe, simpler to use and produces images in the real time. However, images produced by an ultrasound imaging system, must be of sufficient quality to provide accurate clinical interpretation. The most commonly used image quality measure...

Ultrasound Imaging is primary modality in the diagnosis of many diseases. Compared to other imaging techniques ultrasound imaging owes its great popularity to the fact that it is safe and noninvasive procedure for visualizing the heart, vasculature, abdomen, fetal monitoring etc. Ultrasound images are degraded by intrinsic artifacts called speckle which is result of constructive and destructive...

Ultrasound images of the heart are obtained by a probe placed on the patient's chest. The resultant image is a triangular plane with its base in the middle of the body and the tip close to the probe on the chest. Thus, image planes with a different orientation (e.g. parallel to the surface of the body) are impossible to obtain. The aim of current 3D ultrasound of the heart is to provide the phy...

Plane-wave ultrasound imaging (PWUS) has become an important method of ultrasound imaging in recent years as its frame rate has exceeded 10,000 frames per second, allowing ultrasound to be used for two-dimensional shear wave detection and functional brain imaging. However, compared to the traditional focusing and scanning method, PWUS images always suffer from a degradation of lateral resolutio...

Photoacoustic (PA) or optoacoustic imaging is a relatively new imaging modality based on the detection of light-excited ultrasound waves, has emerged as one of the most exciting research areas in biomedical imaging over the past decade [1-4]. In PA imaging, nanosecond pulsed (or modulated) electromagnetic radiation is delivered into tissues to excite ultrasound waves via photon absorption and t...

Ultrasound is well-suited for intraoperative imaging because it is cheap, portable, provides images in real-time, and does not use ionizing radiation. However hand-held ultrasound is user-dependent because it requires dexterity to obtain high-quality images, and certain features such as bone or air cannot be penetrated. In contrast, preoperative imaging provides much greater anatomical detail a...

Three-dimensional ultrasound is a powerful imaging technique, but it requires thousands of sensors and complex hardware. Very recently, the discovery of compressive sensing has shown that the signal structure can be exploited to reduce the burden posed by traditional sensing requirements. In this spirit, we have designed a simple ultrasound imaging device that can perform three-dimensional imag...

Multi-modality fusion imaging for targeted prostate biopsy is difficult because of prostate motion during the biopsy procedure. A closed-loop control mechanism is proposed to improve the efficacy and safety of the biopsy procedure, which uses real-time ultrasound and spatial tracking as feedback to adjust the registration between a preoperative 3D image (e.g. MRI) and real-time ultrasound image...

This paper proposes new enhancement models to the methods of nonlinear anisotropic diffusion to greatly reduce speckle and preserve image features in medical ultrasound images. By incorporating local physical characteristics of the image, in this case scatterer density, in addition to the gradient, into existing tensorbased image diffusion methods, we were able to greatly improve the performanc...

In this paper we have surveyed the recent developments in the area of in-body ultrasound imaging for cardiovascular interventions. With miniaturized ultrasound sensors integrated at the tip of the instruments (catheters, needles, endoscopes), the local anatomical sites can be imaged with high accuracy. We have covered the applications of TEE (Transesophageal echocardiography), ICE (intracardiac...