Organizations: Department of Diagnostic Ultrasound Imaging & Interventional Therapy, Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China · Research Center of Interventional Medicine and Engineering, Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China · Wenling Institute of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Taizhou, China · Zhejiang Provincial Research Center for Innovative Technology and Equipment in Interventional Oncology, Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, Hangzhou, China · Department of Diagnostic Ultrasound Imaging & Interventional Therapy, Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, Hangzhou Institute of Medicine (HIM), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou 310022, China · Research Center of Interventional Medicine and Engineering, Hangzhou Institute of Medicine (HIM), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou 310000, China · Wenling Institute of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Taizhou 317502, China · Zhejiang Provincial Research Center for Innovative Technology and Equipment in Interventional Oncology, Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, Hangzhou 310022, China · College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, Zhejiang, China · Department of Ultrasound, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Chinese PLA Medical School, Beijing, China
Super-resolution ultrasound (SRUS) technology has overcome the resolution limitations of conventional ultrasound, enabling micrometer-scale imaging of microvasculature. However, due to the nature of imaging principles, three-dimensional reconstruction of microvasculature from SRUS remains an open challenge. We developed microvascular visualization fold (MVis-Fold), an innovative three-dimensional microvascular reconstruction model that integrates a cross-scale network architecture. This model can perform high-fidelity inference and reconstruction of three-dimensional microvascular networks from two-dimensional SRUS images. It precisely calculates key parameters in three-dimensional space that traditional two-dimensional SRUS cannot readily obtain. We validated the model's accuracy and reliability in three-dimensional microvascular reconstruction of solid tumors. This study establishes a foundation for three-dimensional quantitative analysis of microvasculature. It provides new tools and methods for diagnosis and monitoring of various diseases.
Generative super-resolution (SR) can recover sharp detail in computed tomography (CT) images from severely downsampled observations, but the missing high-frequency content is not uniquely determined by the low-resolution input. Consequently, visually plausible reconstructions may contain anatomically unsupported vascular detail, such as missing, spurious, or incorrectly connected vessels. To overcome this challenge, we introduce VascuSR, an iterative anatomy-aware diffusion framework that combines image reconstruction with explicit 3D vascular guidance. First, to provide richer anatomical guidance, we use an explicit 3D vascular representation that captures structural information beyond individual slices. This representation also simplifies vascular refinement by allowing a lightweight 3D generative refiner to focus on vascular structure rather than complex CT appearance. Second, to guide slice-wise SR, a lightweight anatomy controller injects the refined structure into the diffusion decoder, while iterative feedback updates this guidance from each new SR volume. On re-annotated MSD Task08 and HVM datasets, VascuSR outperforms interpolation and learning-based SR baselines in segmentation accuracy (Dice and clDice) and 3D vascular structure (connectivity and mean centerline distance), while maintaining image quality comparable to its SR backbone. Compared with learning-based baselines, VascuSR reduces class-averaged connected-component counts by over 20% on both datasets and mean centerline distance by over 10% on MSD.
Hairong Ni, Jiahe Huang, Minghao Guo +2
University of Michigan · University of California, San Diego · MIT CSAIL
Optical coherence tomographic angiography (OCTA) is a powerful technique for imaging retinal microvasculature. However, acquiring reliable quantification of retinal blood flow and areas of retinal nonperfusion is challenging because of imaging artifacts. Existing methods primarily focus on noise suppression, projection artifact removal, or signal enhancement to improve the image quality of OCTA in cross-sectional or two-dimensional (2D) en face projections, while neglecting the intrinsic three-dimensional vascular architecture. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based algorithm for restoring capillary anatomical vasculature from a single OCTA volume. The network consists of an EfficientNet-B5 encoder and a decoder incorporating concurrent spatial and channel squeeze-and-excitation modules, connected via skip connections to preserve spatial resolution. Three adjacent B-frames are used as input to predict the restored middle B-frame. We evaluated the performance of the model using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) against ground truth generated from averaging multiple scans. The results show that the proposed model significantly (both p < 0.001) improved image quality compared with the original single OCTA volume, with a PSNR of 26.16 +/- 1.26 vs. 22.23 +/- 0.78 and an SSIM of 0.91 +/- 0.02 vs. 0.72 +/- 0.03. The proposed model also significantly (p < 0.001) improved microvascular fidelity, measured by the Dice coefficient overlap between the model output and ground truth, in both 2D and 3D by at least 3.8% and 51.2%, respectively, across several different vascular slabs.
Yukun Guo, Min Gao, Tristan T. Hormel +3
Casey Eye Institute, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR 97239, USA · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR 97239, USA
Wide Field-of-View (WFoV) reconstruction enhances 3D ultrasound imaging by providing valuable anatomical context for segmentation models and visualization. Clinical ultrasound volumes are predominantly acquired using convex probes, which generate expanding, diverging acoustic beams to maximize anatomical coverage. Stitching these sweeps together traditionally introduces significant compounding artifacts and aliasing due to depth-dependent resolution changes. Here, we introduce Ultra-Wide-NeRF, a Multivariate 3D Gaussian (MVG) NeRF-based method for WFoV ultrasound reconstruction. By explicitly modeling the complex beam geometry using distance-dependent convex volumetric sampling and anisotropic 3D Gaussians, our method inherently mitigates these compounding artifacts and provides anti-aliasing. Beyond simply reconstructing a static 3D grid, our NeRF-based approach yields a continuous neural representation of the tissue, enabling the synthesis of high-fidelity novel views from arbitrary virtual trajectories. We validate Ultra-Wide-NeRF for intracardiac echocardiography on phantom and porcine datasets, demonstrating that our method expands the spatial context important in intraoperative navigation. Code will be open-sourced upon publication.
Patris Valera, Magdalena Wysocki, Felix Duelmer +4
Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures (CAMP), Technical University of Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany · LUMA Vision, Beech Hill Road, Dublin, Ireland