Tracking Performance in Ultrasound Super-Resolution Imaging

Tracking plays an important role in super-resolution (SR) ultrasound imaging, as it improves the quality and sharpness of the final SR images. Moreover, tracking enables quantification of clinically important parameters, such as blood flow velocity. However, the tracking performance degrades in the presence of complex particle patterns and localization uncertainty due to noise and motion. This work presents and discusses multiple approaches for tracking evaluation and compares a nearest-neighbor (NN) with a Kalman tracker through simulations and an in vivo experiment. It is shown that in the presence of a localization uncertainty with a standard deviation (SD) of λ/5, the bias and SD of the velocity estimates reach -1.04 ± 0.9 mm/s and -0.12 ± 0.72 mm/s in the NN and Kalman tracker, respectively (relative to the peak velocity of 10 mm/s). The precision of individual track positions is estimated for an in vivo experiment as 37.95 ± 21.37 µm and 23.9 ± 11.82 µm for the NN and Kalman trackers, respectively. The results indicate that the Kalman tracker achieves a better velocity estimation and reduces localization uncertainty.