WO2022006735A1

WO2022006735A1 - Contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method, ultrasonic imaging apparatus, and storage medium

Info

Publication number: WO2022006735A1
Application number: PCT/CN2020/100627
Authority: WO
Inventors: 章希睿; 桑茂栋; 朱磊
Original assignee: 深圳迈瑞生物医疗电子股份有限公司
Priority date: 2020-07-07
Filing date: 2020-07-07
Publication date: 2022-01-13
Also published as: CN115811958A

Abstract

Provided are a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method, an ultrasonic imaging apparatus, and a storage medium. The method comprises: on the basis of a plurality of ultrasonic pulses, exciting an ultrasonic probe to transmit ultrasonic waves to a target medium including a contrast agent, in order to receive echos of the ultrasonic waves, and to acquire, on the basis of the echos of the ultrasonic waves, a plurality of groups of ultrasonic echo data, wherein at least one of the amplitudes, phases and frequencies of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses is different; performing contrast microbubble signal extraction on the plurality of groups of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed; performing singular value decomposition filtering on the data to be processed to obtain processed data; and obtaining a contrast image on the basis of the processed data. In the solution of the present application, singular value decomposition filtering is performed on the ultrasonic echo data including the microbubble signal, and data used for contrast imaging is processed in a non-frequency domain, such that the problem of band overlap occurring during frequency domain processing can be avoided, thereby further increasing the signal-to-noise ratio and the contrast-to-tissue ratio of the contrast image.

Description

Contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method, ultrasound imaging device, and storage medium

manual

technical field

The present application relates to the technical field of ultrasound imaging, and more particularly, to a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method, an ultrasound imaging device, and a storage medium.

Background technique

Penetration (sensitivity) and residual background are the two main indicators to measure the performance of contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging, and further improvement will be beneficial to the enhancement of the clinical value of contrast-enhanced ultrasound. At the technical level, the penetration (sensitivity) can be abstracted as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR for short). The higher the SNR, the better the penetration and the higher the detection sensitivity of contrast agents; Residual is measured by contrast-to-tissue residual ratio (CTR for short), and the larger the value, the stronger the ability to inhibit background residual. Theoretically, only background noise is present in a contrast image with no contrast agent injected, but this is not the case in practice. First, the tissue itself also produces nonlinear components similar to the contrast agent, which are easy to be detected together with the nonlinear echo of the contrast agent; secondly, the front-end circuit will inevitably have inconsistent amplitude and phase when transmitting the pulse sequence, resulting in tissue The components cannot be completely canceled; in addition, strong reflective surfaces such as blood vessel walls, organ capsules, and bones can easily lead to signal saturation, which is also reflected in the image as tissue residue.

In the existing technical solution, the improvement of SNR and CTR of angiographic images mainly depends on the pulse sequence method, which mainly includes: positive and negative harmonics (transmitting two pulses with a phase difference of 180°, and combining the echoes to extract the second harmonic wave component), amplitude modulation (transmitting multiple pulses with different amplitudes, and performing corresponding composite processing on the echo to extract the nonlinear fundamental wave component), and amplitude modulation-phase inversion (transmitting multiple pulses with different amplitudes and phase differences by 180 ° pulse, do the corresponding composite processing to the echo to extract the nonlinear fundamental wave and the second harmonic component at the same time) and so on. This type of method has two disadvantages: 1) Both tissue and microbubbles will produce second harmonic components, and the system noise is mostly white noise, so there must be problems of tissue residue, microbubbles and noise frequency bands overlapping, and the subsequent frequency domain filtering processing The improvement of SNR and CTR is very limited; 2) The nonlinear fundamental wave can improve the frequency band overlap problem to a certain extent, and the performance is improved compared with the second harmonic, but it still cannot completely eliminate the wideband caused by the asymmetry of the front-end circuit and signal saturation. residual signal.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present application provides a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging solution, which performs singular value decomposition filtering on ultrasonic echo data containing microbubble signals, and processes the data for contrast-enhanced imaging in the non-frequency domain, which can improve the signal-to-noise ratio of contrast-enhanced images and improve performance. Contrast-tissue residual ratio. The contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging solution proposed by the present application is briefly described below, and more details will be described in the specific embodiments in conjunction with the accompanying drawings later.

In one aspect of the present application, a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method is provided. The method includes: exciting an ultrasound probe based on a plurality of ultrasound pulses to emit ultrasound waves to a target medium containing a contrast agent, receiving echoes of the ultrasound waves, and obtaining multiple ultrasound waves based on the echoes of the ultrasound waves. group of ultrasound echo data; wherein, at least one of the amplitude, phase and frequency of multiple ultrasound pulses is different; perform contrast microbubble signal extraction on multiple sets of ultrasound echo data to obtain data to be processed; perform a first matrix on the data to be processed Performing singular value decomposition on the space-time signal matrix to obtain the singular value decomposition result; Thresholding the singular value decomposition result to filter out the singular value corresponding to the tissue residue and/or noise value to obtain the processed space-time domain signal matrix; perform second matrix processing on the processed space-time domain signal matrix to obtain processed data, and the second matrix processing and the first matrix processing are mutually inverse processes; An contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.

In another aspect of the present application, there is provided an ultrasonic imaging method, the method comprising: exciting an ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses to emit ultrasonic waves to a target medium containing a contrast agent, receiving echoes of the ultrasonic waves, and acquiring multiple ultrasonic waves based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves. group of ultrasonic echo data; wherein, at least one of the amplitude, phase and frequency of multiple ultrasonic pulses is different; perform contrast microbubble signal extraction on multiple groups of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed; perform singular value decomposition on the data to be processed , obtain the singular value decomposition result of the spatial signal matrix; perform thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result to filter out the singular values corresponding to the tissue residue and/or noise, and obtain the processed data; obtain the contrast image based on the processed data .

In yet another aspect of the present application, an ultrasonic imaging method is provided, the method comprising: exciting an ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses to emit ultrasonic waves to a target medium containing a contrast agent, receiving ultrasonic echoes, and acquiring multiple ultrasonic waves based on the ultrasonic echoes group of ultrasonic echo data; wherein, at least one of the amplitude, phase and frequency of multiple ultrasonic pulses is different; perform contrast microbubble signal extraction on multiple groups of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed; perform singular value decomposition on the data to be processed After filtering, the processed data is obtained; the contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.

In yet another aspect of the present application, an ultrasonic imaging device is provided, the device includes an ultrasonic probe, a transmit/receive sequence controller, a processor and a display, wherein: the transmit/receive sequence controller is used to: excite the ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses transmitting ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, receiving the echoes of the ultrasonic waves, and acquiring multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein, at least one of the amplitudes, phases and frequencies of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses is different; the processor is used for : Extract the contrast microbubble signal from multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain the data to be processed; perform the first matrix processing on the data to be processed to obtain the space-time signal matrix; perform singular value decomposition on the space-time signal matrix to obtain the singular value Value decomposition results; thresholding the singular value decomposition results to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain the processed space-time domain signal matrix; The second matrixing process is used to obtain processed data, and the second matrixing process and the first matrixing process are mutually inverse processes; an contrast image is obtained based on the processed data; the display is used for: displaying the contrast image.

In yet another aspect of the present application, an ultrasonic imaging device is provided, the device includes an ultrasonic probe, a transmit/receive sequence controller, a processor and a display, wherein: the transmit/receive sequence controller is used to: excite the ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses transmitting ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, receiving the echoes of the ultrasonic waves, and acquiring multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein, at least one of the amplitudes, phases and frequencies of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses is different; the processor is used for : Extract the contrast microbubble signal from multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain the data to be processed; perform singular value decomposition on the data to be processed to obtain the singular value decomposition result of the spatial signal matrix; perform thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result to filter The singular value corresponding to the tissue residue and/or noise is divided to obtain the processed data; the contrast image is obtained based on the processed data; the display is used for: displaying the contrast image.

In yet another aspect of the present application, an ultrasonic imaging device is provided, the device includes an ultrasonic probe, a transmit/receive sequence controller, a processor and a display, wherein: the transmit/receive sequence controller is used to: excite the ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses transmitting ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, receiving the echoes of the ultrasonic waves, and acquiring multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein, at least one of the amplitudes, phases and frequencies of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses is different; the processor is used for : Extract the contrast microbubble signal from multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain the data to be processed; perform singular value decomposition filtering on the data to be processed to obtain the processed data; obtain contrast images based on the processed data; the display is used to: display contrast image.

In yet another aspect of the present application, a storage medium is provided, and a computer program is stored on the storage medium, and the computer program executes the above-mentioned contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method when running.

According to the ultrasound contrast imaging method, ultrasound imaging device, and storage medium of the embodiments of the present application, singular value decomposition filtering is performed on ultrasound echo data containing microbubble signals, and the data for contrast imaging is processed in the non-frequency domain, which can avoid occurrence of The frequency band overlap problem in frequency domain processing can further improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the contrast-tissue residual ratio of angiography images.

Description of drawings

FIG. 1 shows a schematic block diagram of an exemplary ultrasound imaging apparatus for implementing a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to an embodiment of the present application.

FIG. 2 shows a schematic flowchart of a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to an embodiment of the present application.

FIG. 3 shows an example diagram of a contrast image obtained without using the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application.

FIG. 4 shows an example diagram of a contrast-enhanced image obtained by using the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to an embodiment of the present application.

FIG. 5 shows a schematic flowchart of a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to another embodiment of the present application.

FIG. 6 shows a schematic flowchart of a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to still another embodiment of the present application.

FIG. 7 shows a schematic block diagram of an ultrasound imaging apparatus according to an embodiment of the present application.

FIG. 8 shows a schematic block diagram of an ultrasound imaging apparatus according to another embodiment of the present application.

detailed description

In order to make the objectives, technical solutions and advantages of the present application more apparent, the exemplary embodiments according to the present application will be described in detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings. Obviously, the described embodiments are only a part of the embodiments of the present application, rather than all the embodiments of the present application, and it should be understood that the present application is not limited by the example embodiments described herein. Based on the embodiments of the present application described in the present application, all other embodiments obtained by those skilled in the art without creative efforts shall fall within the protection scope of the present application.

In the following description, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a more thorough understanding of the present application. It will be apparent, however, to one skilled in the art that the present application may be practiced without one or more of these details. In other instances, some technical features known in the art have not been described in order to avoid confusion with the present application.

It should be understood that the application may be embodied in different forms and should not be construed as limited to the embodiments set forth herein. Rather, these embodiments are provided so that this disclosure will be thorough and complete, and will fully convey the scope of this application to those skilled in the art.

The terminology used herein is for the purpose of describing particular embodiments only and is not intended to be limiting of the application. As used herein, the singular forms "a," "an," and "the/the" are intended to include the plural forms as well, unless the context clearly dictates otherwise. It should also be understood that the terms "compose" and/or "include", when used in this specification, identify the presence of stated features, integers, steps, operations, elements and/or components, but do not exclude one or more other The presence or addition of features, integers, steps, operations, elements, parts and/or groups. As used herein, the term "and/or" includes any and all combinations of the associated listed items.

For a thorough understanding of the present application, detailed steps and detailed structures will be presented in the following description, so as to explain the technical solutions proposed by the present application. The preferred embodiments of the present application are described in detail below, however, the present application may have other embodiments in addition to these detailed descriptions.

First, an exemplary ultrasound imaging apparatus for implementing the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method of the embodiment of the present application will be described with reference to FIG. 1 .

FIG. 1 is a schematic structural block diagram of an exemplary ultrasound imaging apparatus 10 for implementing the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application. As shown in FIG. 1 , the ultrasound imaging apparatus 10 may include an ultrasound probe 100 , a transmit/receive selection switch 101 , a transmit/receive sequence controller 102 , a processor 103 , a display 104 and a memory 105 . The transmit/receive sequence controller 102 can excite the ultrasonic probe 100 to transmit ultrasonic waves to the target object (measured object), and can also control the ultrasonic probe 100 to receive ultrasonic echoes returned from the target object, thereby obtaining ultrasonic echo signals/data. The processor 103 processes the ultrasound echo signals/data to obtain tissue-related parameters and ultrasound images of the target object. The ultrasound images obtained by the processor 103 may be stored in the memory 105 , and these ultrasound images may be displayed on the display 104 .

In the embodiment of the present application, the display 104 of the aforementioned ultrasound imaging device 10 may be a touch display screen, a liquid crystal display screen, or the like, or may be an independent display device such as a liquid crystal display, a TV, or the like independent of the ultrasound imaging device 10 , or It is a display screen on electronic devices such as mobile phones and tablet computers.

In the embodiment of the present application, the memory 105 of the aforementioned ultrasonic imaging device 10 may be a flash memory card, a solid-state memory, a hard disk, or the like.

Embodiments of the present application further provide a computer-readable storage medium, where the computer-readable storage medium stores a plurality of program instructions, and after the plurality of program instructions are invoked and executed by the processor 103, the ultrasound system in the various embodiments of the present application can be executed. Some or all of the steps or any combination of steps in a contrast imaging method.

In one embodiment, the computer-readable storage medium may be the memory 105, which may be a non-volatile storage medium such as a flash memory card, a solid-state memory, and a hard disk.

In this embodiment of the present application, the processor 103 of the aforementioned ultrasound imaging apparatus 10 may be implemented by software, hardware, firmware, or a combination thereof, and may use a circuit, a single or multiple application specific integrated circuits (ASIC), a single or General-purpose integrated circuits, single or multiple microprocessors, single or multiple programmable logic devices, or a combination of the foregoing circuits or devices, or other suitable circuits or devices, thereby enabling the processor 103 to perform various embodiments Corresponding steps in the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method.

The contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method of the present application will be described in detail below with reference to FIGS. 2 to 6 , and the method may be performed by the aforementioned ultrasound imaging apparatus 10 .

FIG. 2 shows a schematic flowchart of a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 200 according to an embodiment of the present application. As shown in FIG. 2, the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 200 includes the following steps:

In step S210, the ultrasonic probe is excited based on the plurality of ultrasonic pulses to transmit ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, the echoes of the ultrasonic waves are received, and multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data are obtained based on the ultrasonic wave echoes; wherein, the amplitudes of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses are , at least one of phase and frequency are different.

In the embodiments of the present application, the ultrasound probe is excited based on a plurality of ultrasound pulses with different parameters to emit ultrasound waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, where the parameters may include at least one of amplitude, phase and frequency. Based on this, multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data can be acquired accordingly, and different sets of ultrasonic echo data can correspond to ultrasonic pulses with different parameters. In the embodiments of this application, the acquired ultrasonic echo data may refer to all forms and links of signal data collected by the ultrasonic imaging platform, including but not limited to: analog signals, digital signals, pre-beamforming channel data, beam Data after synthesis, data before demodulation, data after demodulation, etc.

In step S220, the contrast microbubble signal extraction is performed on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed.

In the embodiment of the present application, step S210 may correspond to the processing of the transmitting end in the pulse sequence processing method; correspondingly, the processing corresponding to the receiving end in the pulse sequence processing method may be performed in step S220, the processing is to extract the contrast microbubble signal For the purpose of nonlinear echo data, this process is called contrast microbubble signal extraction. In the embodiments of the present application, the extraction of the contrast microbubble signal may include, but is not limited to, forward and reverse harmonics, amplitude modulation, and amplitude modulation-phase inversion, etc., corresponding to processing at the receiving end. Based on the above processing, the data to be processed can be obtained.

In step S230, a first matrixing process is performed on the data to be processed to obtain a space-time domain signal matrix.

In the embodiments of the present application, the data to be processed may be processed frame by frame, or the data to be processed may be processed in batches. In the embodiment described in conjunction with FIG. 2 , the method of processing the data to be processed in batches is mainly described, and the method of processing the data to be processed frame by frame will be described later in the embodiment described in conjunction with FIG. 5 . In the embodiments of the present application, when the data to be processed is processed in batches, the data to be processed of the same number of frames can be acquired each time, and the data to be processed of different numbers of frames can also be acquired. In addition, when processing the data to be processed in batches, the data to be processed obtained in two adjacent processings may overlap with each other (that is, the data to be processed obtained twice adjacently include part of the same data), or There is no overlap of data (that is, the data to be processed obtained twice adjacently do not include the same data). In other words, when data to be processed is processed in batches, the data to be processed obtained during two adjacent processes may be shared or not shared. It should be understood that when the data is shared, a better processing effect can be obtained, because the shared data is processed more than once, and more accurate calculation results can be obtained; when the data is not shared, the processing speed can be improved, because the overall calculated data volume is relatively large. few. Data sharing or non-sharing can be selected according to specific needs.

In the embodiments of the present application, when processing data to be processed in batches, multiple frames of data to be processed can be acquired each time. Since each frame of data to be processed contains spatial information, and the multiple frames of data to be processed contain time domain information, it is possible to obtain multiple frames of data to be processed each time. Perform matrix processing on the acquired multi-frame data to be processed to obtain a space-time domain signal matrix for subsequent processing. In addition, since the subsequent process (step S260 ) includes a matrixing process that is inverse to the matrixing process, in order to distinguish from each other, the matrixing process here is referred to as the first matrixing process, and the matrix in the subsequent process is referred to as the first matrixing process. This processing is referred to as the second matrixing processing.

As mentioned above, the ultrasonic echo data acquired in step S210 may be signal data in various forms, which will be described below by taking the baseband data after beamformation as an example. In the embodiment of the present application, it is assumed that M frames of baseband data to be processed after beamformation are obtained in step S220, and the M frames of data can be recorded as: _sk,l (t ₁ ), _sk,l (t ₂ ), ...,s _k,l (t _M ); where the index k∈[1,K] can represent the kth sampling point in the vertical direction, and the index l∈[1,L] can represent the lth receiving line in the horizontal direction, then the The M frames of data to be processed are subjected to the first matrix processing to obtain a space-time domain signal matrix S, which can be characterized as:

As can be seen from the above formula (1), this step transforms a K×L×M three-dimensional array (M frames of K×L-dimensional data) into a KL×M-dimensional large matrix S. Among them, the column dimension of S corresponds to the time domain information of the signal, and the row dimension corresponds to the spatial domain information of the signal, so it is defined as a space-time domain signal matrix.

Based on the obtained space-time signal matrix, subsequent processing can be performed.

In step S240, singular value decomposition (singular value decomposition, abbreviated as SVD) is performed on the space-time domain signal matrix to obtain a singular value decomposition result.

In the embodiment of the present application, singular value decomposition is performed on the space-time domain signal matrix obtained in step S230, and a space singular vector and a time singular vector containing multiple singular values can be obtained. The thresholding described in the subsequent steps can be used. Processing (setting a threshold based on tissue residue and/or noise) removes some singular values together with the corresponding singular vectors to achieve the suppression of tissue residue and/or noise in the data to be processed. The processed data is used for contrast imaging, and the obtained Contrast images can achieve improved SNR and CTR.

Now following the example of the previous step to describe, for the space-time domain signal matrix S obtained in the previous step, the singular value decomposition result obtained by performing singular value decomposition on it can be expressed as:

In the above formula (2), the operator “(·) ^H ” represents the conjugate transpose operation of the vector/matrix; λ ₁ >λ ₂ >…>λ _P is the P singular values arranged in descending order, and P is the matrix S rank; {u ₁ , u ₂ ,...,u _P } and {v ₁ ,v ₂ ,...,v _P } are the space singular vectors and time singular vectors corresponding to the above singular values, respectively, and the dimensions are KL×1 and M×1, and they are orthogonal to each other.

Based on the obtained singular value decomposition results, subsequent processing can be performed.

In step S250, thresholding is performed on the singular value decomposition result to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain a processed space-time domain signal matrix.

As mentioned above, the singular value corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise can be filtered out by thresholding, so as to realize the suppression of tissue residue and noise in the data to be processed. The processed data is used for contrast imaging, and the obtained Contrast images can achieve improved SNR and CTR.

In an embodiment of the present application, thresholding the singular value decomposition result may include: determining whether all singular values in the singular value decomposition result are within a preset threshold range; filtering out singular values that are not within the preset threshold range value and the corresponding singular vector, and reconstruct all the remaining singular values and the corresponding singular vectors to obtain the processed space-time signal matrix; the boundary values of the preset threshold range are the first threshold and the second threshold respectively, the first threshold A threshold value is smaller than a second threshold value, the first threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise, and the second threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the tissue residue.

In this embodiment, three-stage thresholding is performed on the singular value decomposition result, that is, the noise threshold is set as the first threshold, and the tissue residual threshold is set as the second threshold. When the singular value in the singular value decomposition result is smaller than the first threshold, it is considered to be the singular value corresponding to the noise, and it is discarded; when the singular value in the singular value decomposition result is greater than the second threshold, it is considered to be tissue residual The corresponding singular value is also discarded; when the singular value in the singular value decomposition result is within the threshold range formed by the two boundary values of the first threshold and the second threshold, that is, the singular value in the singular value decomposition result is greater than or equal to the first threshold. If a threshold value is less than or equal to the second threshold value, it is regarded as a singular value corresponding to the microbubble signal, and is retained, thereby realizing the suppression of tissue residue and noise in the data to be processed. The retained singular values and corresponding singular vectors are reconstructed to obtain the processed space-time domain signal matrix. Illustratively, the reconstruction may be a linear weighted reconstruction or other reconstruction. It should be understood that this thresholding process is only exemplary, and other thresholding processes can also be used, such as setting only a tissue residual threshold or only a noise threshold, to achieve the purpose of only suppressing tissue residual or only noise, and Or the threshold interval can be set more finely to obtain a more precise suppression effect and so on.

Now, following the example of the previous step, performing three-stage thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result obtained in the previous step may include: 1) Setting the tissue residual threshold α, when λ _p >α, it is considered as tissue residual The corresponding singular value is discarded; 2) Set the noise threshold β (β < α), when λ _p < β, it is regarded as the singular value corresponding to noise, and is also discarded; 3) When α ≥ λ _p ≥ β, it is rejected. It is considered to be the singular value corresponding to the microbubble signal and is retained. At this time, the retained singular values and their singular vectors are respectively recorded as

and

Perform linear weighted reconstruction on it, and the processed space-time signal matrix can be expressed as:

Based on the resulting processed space-time signal matrix, subsequent processing can be performed.

In step S260, a second matrixing process is performed on the processed space-time domain signal matrix to obtain processed data. The second matrixing process and the first matrixing process are mutually inverse processes.

In the embodiments of the present application, the processed space-time domain signal matrix has been filtered out of tissue residue and/or noise, and at this time, it can be restored to the form of multi-frame data to prepare for subsequent imaging processing. As mentioned above, in order to distinguish it from the first matrixing process in step S230, the matrixing process in step S260 is called the second matrixing process, and the two are mutually inverse processes.

Now following the example of the previous step to describe, for the processed space-time domain signal matrix obtained in the previous step

Perform matrix processing corresponding to step S230 on its column vector, and the processed M frames of K×L-dimensional data can be obtained, which can be recorded as:

Based on the obtained multi-frame processed data, subsequent imaging processing can be performed.

In step S270, a contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.

In an embodiment of the present application, obtaining an contrast image based on the processed data may include: performing signal processing on the processed data to obtain gray-scale image data; and generating an contrast image based on the gray-scale image data. Exemplarily, the signal processing may include envelope detection, dynamic range control, brightness compensation, and digital scan conversion (abbreviated as DSC) processing. In another embodiment of the present application, after the gray-scale image data is obtained, gray-scale atlas mapping and/or pseudo-color atlas mapping may be performed on the gray-scale image data to obtain a contrast image.

3 and 4 respectively show an example diagram of a contrast image obtained without using the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application and an example diagram of a contrast image obtained by using the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application. It can be seen from the comparison between FIG. 3 and FIG. 4 that, compared with the canine liver contrast image obtained without using the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application, the canine liver contrast-enhanced image obtained by using the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application has The near-field tissue residue is significantly suppressed, and the effect of enhancing the microbubble signal is achieved under the premise of unchanged background noise, which shows that the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application can simultaneously improve the SNR and CTR of the contrast-enhanced image.

Based on the above description, the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 200 according to the embodiment of the present application performs singular value decomposition filtering on the ultrasound echo data including microbubble signals, and processes the data for contrast-enhanced imaging in the non-frequency domain, which can avoid appearing in the The frequency band overlap problem in frequency domain processing can further improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the contrast-tissue residual ratio of angiography images.

The above exemplarily shows a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to an embodiment of the present application. The contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging methods of other embodiments of the present application will be described below with reference to FIG. 5 and FIG. 6 .

FIG. 5 shows a schematic flowchart of a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 500 according to another embodiment of the present application. As shown in FIG. 5 , the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 500 includes the following steps:

In step S510, the ultrasonic probe is excited based on the plurality of ultrasonic pulses to transmit ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, the echoes of the ultrasonic waves are received, and multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data are obtained based on the ultrasonic wave echoes; wherein, the amplitudes of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses are , at least one of phase and frequency are different.

In step S520, the contrast microbubble signal extraction is performed on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed.

In step S530, singular value decomposition is performed on the data to be processed to obtain a singular value decomposition result of the spatial signal matrix.

In step S540, thresholding is performed on the singular value decomposition result to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain processed data.

In step S550, a contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.

The contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 500 according to the embodiment of the present application is substantially similar to the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 200 according to the embodiment of the present application described above, except that the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method according to the embodiment of the present application described above 200 is to process the data to be processed in batches, while the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 500 according to the embodiment of the present application is to process the data to be processed frame by frame. Since it is processed frame by frame, the data to be processed each time only contains spatial domain information, not time domain information. It is not necessary to perform the aforementioned first matrix processing and second matrix processing, but to directly process the data to be processed. Singular value decomposition and thresholding are used to obtain processed data for ultrasound imaging. That is to say, the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 200 according to the embodiment of the present application realizes the improvement of the SNR and CTR of the contrast-enhanced image through spatial-temporal singular value decomposition filtering, while the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 500 according to the embodiment of the present application uses the spatial-domain singular value decomposition The filtering realizes the improvement of the SNR and CTR of the contrast image. In other embodiments, other singular value decomposition filters may also be used to improve the SNR and CTR of the contrast image.

FIG. 6 shows a schematic flowchart of a contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 600 according to still another embodiment of the present application. As shown in FIG. 6 , the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 600 includes the following steps:

In step S610, the ultrasonic probe is excited based on the plurality of ultrasonic pulses to transmit ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, the echoes of the ultrasonic waves are received, and multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data are acquired based on the ultrasonic wave echoes; wherein, the amplitudes of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses are , at least one of phase and frequency are different.

In step S620, the contrast microbubble signal extraction is performed on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed.

In step S630, singular value decomposition filtering is performed on the data to be processed to obtain processed data.

In step S640, a contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.

The contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 600 according to the embodiment of the present application is substantially similar to the contrast-enhanced

ultrasound imaging methods

200 and 500 described above according to the embodiment of the present application, and the difference is that in the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 600 according to the embodiment of the present application The singular value decomposition filtering of the data to be processed is not limited to the spatial time domain singular value decomposition filtering and the spatial domain singular value decomposition filtering, but can also be other singular value decomposition filtering. Correspondingly, the aforementioned contrast-enhanced

ultrasound imaging methods

200 and 500 according to the embodiments of the present application can be used as two implementation manners of the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 600 according to the embodiments of the present application.

In an embodiment of the present application, performing singular value decomposition filtering on the data to be processed in step S630 to obtain processed data may include: performing a first matrixing process on the data to be processed to obtain a space-time domain signal matrix; Domain signal matrix is subjected to singular value decomposition to obtain singular value decomposition results; thresholding is performed on the singular value decomposition results to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise, and the processed space-time domain signal matrix is obtained; The processed space-time domain signal matrix is subjected to a second matrixing process to obtain processed data. The second matrixing process and the first matrixing process are mutually inverse processes.

In another embodiment of the present application, performing singular value decomposition filtering on the data to be processed in step S630 to obtain processed data may include: performing singular value decomposition on the data to be processed to obtain a singular value decomposition result of the spatial signal matrix; Thresholding is performed on the singular value decomposition result to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residues and/or noise to obtain processed data.

Based on the above description, the ultrasound

contrast imaging methods

500 and 600 according to the embodiments of the present application perform singular value decomposition filtering on the ultrasound echo data including microbubble signals, and process the data for contrast imaging in the non-frequency domain, which can avoid The frequency band overlap problem in frequency domain processing can further improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the contrast-tissue residual ratio of angiography images.

The ultrasound imaging device provided according to another aspect of the application is described below with reference to FIG. 7 and FIG. 8 . FIG. 7 shows a schematic block diagram of an ultrasound imaging apparatus 700 according to an embodiment of the present application. As shown in FIG. 7 , the ultrasound imaging apparatus 700 may include a transmit/receive sequence controller 710 , an ultrasound probe 720 , a processor 730 and a display 740 . The ultrasound imaging apparatus 700 may be used to implement the aforementioned contrast-enhanced

ultrasound imaging methods

200 , 500 and 600 according to the embodiments of the present application. Those skilled in the art can understand the specific operations of each component in the ultrasonic imaging apparatus 700 in combination with the foregoing description. For the sake of brevity, only the main operations are briefly described here.

In the embodiment of the present application, when the ultrasound imaging apparatus 700 is used to implement the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 200 according to the embodiment of the present application, the transmit/receive sequence controller 710 is configured to: excite the ultrasound probe 720 based on a plurality of ultrasound pulses to include The target medium of the contrast agent transmits ultrasonic waves, receives ultrasonic echoes, and obtains multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the ultrasonic echoes; wherein, at least one of the amplitudes, phases and frequencies of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses is different; the processor 730 is used for : Extract the contrast microbubble signal from multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain the data to be processed; perform the first matrix processing on the data to be processed to obtain the space-time signal matrix; perform singular value decomposition on the space-time signal matrix to obtain the singular value Value decomposition results; thresholding the singular value decomposition results to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain the processed space-time domain signal matrix; Two matrixing processes are performed to obtain processed data, and the second matrixing process and the first matrixing process are mutually inverse processes; an contrast image is obtained based on the processed data; the display 740 is used for: displaying the contrast image.

In the embodiment of the present application, when the ultrasound imaging apparatus 700 is used to implement the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 500 according to the embodiment of the present application, the transmit/receive sequence controller 710 is configured to: excite the ultrasound probe 720 based on a plurality of ultrasound pulses to include The target medium of the contrast agent transmits ultrasonic waves, receives ultrasonic echoes, and obtains multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the ultrasonic echoes; wherein, at least one of the amplitudes, phases and frequencies of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses is different; the processor 730 is used for : Extract the contrast microbubble signal from multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain the data to be processed; perform singular value decomposition on the data to be processed to obtain the singular value decomposition result of the spatial signal matrix; perform thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result to filter The singular value corresponding to the tissue residue and/or noise is divided to obtain processed data; an contrast image is obtained based on the processed data; the display 740 is used for: displaying the contrast image.

In the embodiment of the present application, when the ultrasound imaging apparatus 700 is used to implement the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method 600 according to the embodiment of the present application, the transmit/receive sequence controller 710 is configured to: excite the ultrasound probe 720 based on a plurality of ultrasound pulses to include The target medium of the contrast agent transmits ultrasonic waves, receives ultrasonic echoes, and obtains multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the ultrasonic echoes; wherein, at least one of the amplitudes, phases and frequencies of the plurality of ultrasonic pulses is different; the processor 730 is used for : perform contrast microbubble signal extraction on multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed; perform singular value decomposition filtering on the data to be processed to obtain processed data; obtain contrast images based on the processed data; the display 740 is used for: displaying Contrast image.

In the embodiment of the present application, the processor 730 performs thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result, which may include: determining whether all singular values in the singular value decomposition result are within a preset threshold range; The singular values and corresponding singular vectors of , and all remaining singular values and corresponding singular vectors are reconstructed to obtain the processed space-time domain signal matrix; the boundary values of the preset threshold range are the first threshold and the second threshold respectively. , the first threshold is smaller than the second threshold, the first threshold is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise, and the second threshold is set based on the singular value corresponding to the tissue residue.

In the embodiment of the present application, when performing the first matrixing processing on the data to be processed, the processor 730 may obtain the same number of frames of data to be processed each time to perform the first matrixing processing.

In this embodiment of the present application, when the data to be processed is subjected to the first matrixing process, the data to be processed acquired twice adjacently by the processor 730 may include some of the same data.

In the embodiment of the present application, when the data to be processed is subjected to the first matrixing process, the data to be processed acquired twice adjacently by the processor 730 do not include the same data.

In the embodiment of the present application, the ultrasonic echo data may include any one of the following: channel data before beamforming, data after beamforming, data before demodulation, and data after demodulation.

In the embodiment of the present application, the processor 730 obtains a contrast image based on the processed data, which may include: performing signal processing on the processed data to obtain gray-scale image data; and generating an contrast image based on the gray-scale image data.

In the embodiment of the present application, the processor 730 obtains the contrast image based on the processed data, and may further include: after obtaining the gray-scale image data, performing gray-scale atlas mapping and/or pseudo-color atlas mapping on the gray-scale image data, to obtain contrast images.

In the embodiments of the present application, the signal processing may include, but is not limited to, envelope detection, dynamic range control, brightness compensation, digital scan conversion, and the like.

Based on the above description, the ultrasonic imaging apparatus according to the embodiment of the present application performs singular value decomposition filtering on ultrasonic echo data containing microbubble signals, and processes the data for contrast imaging in the non-frequency domain, which can avoid appearing in the frequency domain. The problem of frequency band overlap during processing can further improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the contrast-tissue residual ratio of angiography images.

FIG. 8 shows a schematic block diagram of an ultrasound imaging apparatus 800 according to another embodiment of the present application. The ultrasound imaging apparatus 800 includes a memory 810 and a processor 820 .

The memory 810 stores programs for implementing corresponding steps in the contrast-enhanced

ultrasound imaging methods

200 , 500 and 600 according to the embodiments of the present application. The processor 820 is configured to run the program stored in the memory 810 to execute the corresponding steps of the contrast-enhanced

ultrasound imaging methods

200 , 500 and 600 according to the embodiments of the present application.

In addition, according to the embodiments of the present application, a storage medium is also provided, and program instructions are stored on the storage medium, and when the program instructions are run by a computer or a processor, the program instructions are used to execute the corresponding steps of the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method of the embodiments of the present application . The storage medium may include, for example, a memory card for a smartphone, a storage unit for a tablet computer, a hard disk for a personal computer, a read only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM), a portable compact disk read only memory (CD). - ROM), USB memory, or any combination of the above storage media. A computer-readable storage medium can be any combination of one or more computer-readable storage media.

In addition, according to the embodiments of the present application, a computer program is also provided, and the computer program can be stored in the cloud or on a local storage medium. When the computer program is run by a computer or a processor, it is used to execute the corresponding steps of the contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method of the embodiments of the present application.

Based on the above description, the ultrasound contrast imaging method, the ultrasound imaging device, and the storage medium according to the embodiments of the present application perform singular value decomposition filtering on the ultrasound echo data including the microbubble signal, and perform the singular value decomposition filtering on the data for contrast imaging in the non-frequency domain. The processing can avoid the frequency band overlap problem in the frequency domain processing, and further improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the contrast-tissue residual ratio of the contrast image.

Although example embodiments have been described herein with reference to the accompanying drawings, it should be understood that the above-described example embodiments are exemplary only, and are not intended to limit the scope of the application thereto. Various changes and modifications may be made therein by those of ordinary skill in the art without departing from the scope and spirit of the present application. All such changes and modifications are intended to be included within the scope of this application as claimed in the appended claims.

Those of ordinary skill in the art can realize that the units and algorithm steps of each example described in conjunction with the embodiments disclosed herein can be implemented in electronic hardware, or a combination of computer software and electronic hardware. Whether these functions are performed in hardware or software depends on the specific application and design constraints of the technical solution. Skilled artisans may implement the described functionality using different methods for each particular application, but such implementations should not be considered beyond the scope of this application.

In the several embodiments provided in this application, it should be understood that the disclosed apparatus and method may be implemented in other manners. For example, the apparatus embodiments described above are only illustrative. For example, the division of units is only a logical function division. In actual implementation, there may be other division methods, for example, multiple units or components may be combined or integrated. To another device, or some features can be ignored, or not implemented.

In the description provided herein, numerous specific details are set forth. It will be understood, however, that the embodiments of the present application may be practiced without these specific details. In some instances, well-known methods, structures and techniques have not been shown in detail in order not to obscure an understanding of this description.

Similarly, it is to be understood that in the description of the exemplary embodiments of the present application, various features of the present application are sometimes grouped together into a single embodiment, FIG. , or in its description. However, this method of application should not be construed as reflecting an intention that the claimed application requires more features than are expressly recited in each claim. Rather, as the corresponding claims reflect, the invention lies in the fact that the corresponding technical problem may be solved with less than all features of a single disclosed embodiment. Thus, the claims following the Detailed Description are hereby expressly incorporated into this Detailed Description, with each claim standing on its own as a separate embodiment of this application.

It will be understood by those skilled in the art that all features disclosed in this specification (including accompanying claims, abstract and drawings) and all features of any method or apparatus so disclosed may be used in any combination, except that the features are mutually exclusive. Processes or units are combined. Each feature disclosed in this specification (including accompanying claims, abstract and drawings) may be replaced by alternative features serving the same, equivalent or similar purpose, unless expressly stated otherwise.

Furthermore, those skilled in the art will appreciate that although some of the embodiments herein include certain features, but not others, included in other embodiments, that combinations of features of the different embodiments are intended to be within the scope of the present application And form different embodiments. For example, in the claims, any of the claimed embodiments may be used in any combination.

Various component embodiments of the present application may be implemented in hardware, or in software modules running on one or more processors, or in a combination thereof. Those skilled in the art should understand that a microprocessor or a digital signal processor (DSP) may be used in practice to implement some or all functions of some modules according to the embodiments of the present application. The present application can also be implemented as a program of apparatus (eg, computer programs and computer program products) for performing part or all of the methods described herein. Such a program implementing the present application may be stored on a computer-readable medium, or may be in the form of one or more signals. Such signals may be downloaded from Internet sites, or provided on carrier signals, or in any other form.

It should be noted that the above-described embodiments illustrate rather than limit the application, and alternative embodiments may be devised by those skilled in the art without departing from the scope of the appended claims. In the claims, any reference signs placed between parentheses shall not be construed as limiting the claim. The application can be implemented by means of hardware comprising several different elements and by means of a suitably programmed computer. In a unit claim enumerating several means, several of these means may be embodied by one and the same item of hardware. The use of the words first, second, and third, etc. do not denote any order. These words can be interpreted as names.

The above are only specific embodiments of the present application or descriptions of the specific embodiments, and the protection scope of the present application is not limited thereto. Or replacement should be covered within the protection scope of this application. The protection scope of the present application shall be subject to the protection scope of the claims.

Claims

A contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method, characterized in that the method comprises:

Based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses, the ultrasonic probe is excited to transmit ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, the echoes of the ultrasonic waves are received, and multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data are acquired based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein, the plurality of ultrasonic pulses are different in at least one of amplitude, phase and frequency;

extracting contrast microbubble signals on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed;

performing a first matrixing process on the to-be-processed data to obtain a space-time domain signal matrix;

Perform singular value decomposition on the space-time domain signal matrix to obtain a singular value decomposition result;

Thresholding the singular value decomposition result to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain a processed space-time signal matrix;

performing a second matrixing process on the processed space-time domain signal matrix to obtain processed data, where the second matrixing process and the first matrixing process are mutually inverse processes;

A contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.
The method according to claim 1, wherein the performing thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result comprises:

determining whether all singular values in the singular value decomposition result are within a preset threshold range;

Filtering out singular values and corresponding singular vectors that are not within the preset threshold range, and reconstructing all remaining singular values and corresponding singular vectors to obtain the processed space-time domain signal matrix;

The boundary values of the preset threshold range are respectively a first threshold value and a second threshold value, the first threshold value is smaller than the second threshold value, the first threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise, and the second threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise. The threshold is set based on the singular value corresponding to the tissue residue.
The method according to claim 1 or 2, wherein when performing the first matrixing process on the data to be processed, the data to be processed of the same frame number is acquired each time to perform the first matrixing process .
The method according to claim 3, characterized in that, when performing the first matrixing process on the data to be processed, the data to be processed obtained twice adjacently include part of the same data.
The method according to claim 3, wherein when performing the first matrixing process on the data to be processed, the data to be processed obtained twice adjacently do not include the same data.
The method according to any one of claims 1-5, wherein the ultrasonic echo data comprises any one of the following: channel data before beamforming, data after beamforming, data before demodulation, data after demodulation.
The method according to any one of claims 1-6, wherein the performing contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging based on the processed data comprises:

performing signal processing on the processed data to obtain gray-scale image data;

A contrast image is generated based on the grayscale image data.
The method according to claim 7, wherein the method further comprises:

After the gray-scale image data is obtained, gray-scale atlas mapping and/or pseudo-color atlas mapping is performed on the gray-scale image data to obtain a contrast image.
The method according to claim 7 or 8, wherein the signal processing includes envelope detection, dynamic range control, brightness compensation and digital scan conversion.
A contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method, characterized in that the method comprises:

Based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses, the ultrasonic probe is excited to emit ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, the echoes of the ultrasonic waves are received, and multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data are acquired based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein, the plurality of ultrasonic pulses are different in at least one of amplitude, phase and frequency;

extracting contrast microbubble signals on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed;

Perform singular value decomposition on the data to be processed to obtain the singular value decomposition result of the spatial signal matrix;

Thresholding the singular value decomposition result to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain processed data;

A contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.
The method according to claim 10, wherein the performing thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result comprises:

determining whether all singular values in the singular value decomposition result are within a preset threshold range;

Filtering out singular values and corresponding singular vectors that are not within the preset threshold range, and reconstructing all remaining singular values and corresponding singular vectors to obtain the processed data;

The boundary values of the preset threshold range are respectively a first threshold value and a second threshold value, the first threshold value is smaller than the second threshold value, the first threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise, and the second threshold value is The threshold is set based on the singular value corresponding to the tissue residue.
A contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging method, characterized in that the method comprises:

Based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses, the ultrasonic probe is excited to emit ultrasonic waves to the target medium containing the contrast agent, the echoes of the ultrasonic waves are received, and multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data are acquired based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein, the plurality of ultrasonic pulses are different in at least one of amplitude, phase and frequency;

extracting contrast microbubble signals on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed;

Perform singular value decomposition filtering on the data to be processed to obtain processed data;

A contrast image is obtained based on the processed data.
An ultrasonic imaging device, characterized in that the device comprises an ultrasonic probe, a transmit/receive sequence controller, a processor and a display, wherein:

The transmit/receive sequence controller is used to:

Excite the ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses to transmit ultrasonic waves to a target medium containing a contrast agent, receive echoes of the ultrasonic waves, and obtain multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein the plurality of ultrasonic waves at least one of the amplitude, phase and frequency of the pulses is different;

The processor is used to:

extracting contrast microbubble signals on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed;

performing a first matrixing process on the to-be-processed data to obtain a space-time domain signal matrix;

Perform singular value decomposition on the space-time domain signal matrix to obtain a singular value decomposition result;

Thresholding the singular value decomposition result to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain a processed space-time signal matrix;

performing a second matrixing process on the processed space-time domain signal matrix to obtain processed data, where the second matrixing process and the first matrixing process are mutually inverse processes;

obtaining a contrast image based on the processed data;

The display is used to: display the contrast image.
The apparatus according to claim 13, wherein the processor performs thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result, comprising:

determining whether all singular values in the singular value decomposition result are within a preset threshold range;

Filtering out singular values and corresponding singular vectors that are not within the preset threshold range, and reconstructing all remaining singular values and corresponding singular vectors to obtain the processed space-time domain signal matrix;

The boundary values of the preset threshold range are respectively a first threshold value and a second threshold value, the first threshold value is smaller than the second threshold value, the first threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise, and the second threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise. The threshold is set based on the singular value corresponding to the tissue residue.
The device according to claim 13 or 14, wherein when performing the first matrixing process on the data to be processed, the processor obtains the data to be processed with the same frame number each time and performs the first matrix process on the data to be processed. A matrix processing.
The apparatus according to claim 15, wherein when performing the first matrixing process on the to-be-processed data, the to-be-processed data acquired by the processor twice adjacently include part of the same data.
The apparatus according to claim 15, wherein when performing the first matrixing process on the data to be processed, the data to be processed obtained twice adjacently by the processor do not include the same data.
The device according to any one of claims 13-17, wherein the ultrasonic echo data comprises any one of the following: channel data before beamforming, data after beamforming, data before demodulation, data after demodulation.
The apparatus according to any one of claims 14-18, wherein the processor performs contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging based on the processed data, comprising:

performing signal processing on the processed data to obtain gray-scale image data;

A contrast image is generated based on the grayscale image data.
The apparatus according to claim 19, wherein the processor performs contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging based on the processed data, further comprising:

After the gray-scale image data is obtained, gray-scale atlas mapping and/or pseudo-color atlas mapping is performed on the gray-scale image data to obtain a contrast image.
The apparatus according to claim 19 or 20, wherein the signal processing includes envelope detection, dynamic range control, luminance compensation and digital scan conversion.
An ultrasonic imaging device, characterized in that the device comprises an ultrasonic probe, a transmit/receive sequence controller, a processor and a display, wherein:

The transmit/receive sequence controller is used to:

Excite the ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses to transmit ultrasonic waves to a target medium containing a contrast agent, receive echoes of the ultrasonic waves, and obtain multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein the plurality of ultrasonic waves at least one of the amplitude, phase and frequency of the pulses is different;

The processor is used to:

extracting contrast microbubble signals on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed;

Perform singular value decomposition on the data to be processed to obtain the singular value decomposition result of the spatial signal matrix;

Thresholding the singular value decomposition result to filter out singular values corresponding to tissue residue and/or noise to obtain processed data;

obtaining a contrast image based on the processed data;

The display is used to: display the contrast image.
The apparatus according to claim 22, wherein the processor performs thresholding processing on the singular value decomposition result, comprising:

determining whether all singular values in the singular value decomposition result are within a preset threshold range;

Filtering out singular values and corresponding singular vectors that are not within the preset threshold range, and reconstructing all remaining singular values and corresponding singular vectors to obtain the processed data;

The boundary values of the preset threshold range are respectively a first threshold value and a second threshold value, the first threshold value is smaller than the second threshold value, the first threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise, and the second threshold value is set based on the singular value corresponding to the noise. The threshold is set based on the singular value corresponding to the tissue residue.
An ultrasonic imaging device, characterized in that the device comprises an ultrasonic probe, a transmit/receive sequence controller, a processor and a display, wherein:

The transmit/receive sequence controller is used to:

Excite the ultrasonic probe based on a plurality of ultrasonic pulses to transmit ultrasonic waves to a target medium containing a contrast agent, receive echoes of the ultrasonic waves, and obtain multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data based on the echoes of the ultrasonic waves; wherein the plurality of ultrasonic waves at least one of the amplitude, phase and frequency of the pulses is different;

The processor is used to:

extracting contrast microbubble signals on the multiple sets of ultrasonic echo data to obtain data to be processed;

Perform singular value decomposition filtering on the data to be processed to obtain processed data;

obtaining a contrast image based on the processed data;

The display is used to: display the contrast image.
A storage medium, characterized in that, a computer program is stored on the storage medium, and the computer program executes the ultrasound contrast imaging method according to any one of claims 1-12 when running.