A Systemic Study on the Performance of Different Quantitative Ultrasound Imaging Techniques for Microwave Ablation Monitoring of Liver

Many quantitative ultrasound imaging techniques based on tissue properties have been established to ensure the safety and efficacy of thermal ablation treatment. However, which quantitative ultrasound imaging technique has superior monitoring properties has not yet been revealed. In this study, we investigated and compared the performance of envelope data distribution-dependent ultrasonic Nakagami, envelope data distribution-independent horizontally normalized Shannon entropy (hNSE), and differential attenuation coefficient intercept (DACI) based on frequency-domain imaging technique during liver thermal ablation treatments. Quantitative ultrasound parameter images were constructed simultaneously from radio frequency (RF) data collected during the process of microwave ablation (MWA) treatments in ex vivo and in vivo porcine livers. Contrast-to-noise ratios (CNRs) were calculated to evaluate the contrast resolution of different imaging techniques. The mean CNR value of hNSE images was 6.06 +/- 2.34 dB, being significantly higher than that of Nakagami images (p < 0.05, statistical) and DACI images (p < 0.05, statistical). Furthermore, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) was used to evaluate the thermal lesion detection ability. The area under the curve (AUC) of B-mode, Nakagami, hNSE, and DACI was 0.823, 0.839, 0.86, and 0.825, respectively. In addition, our data analysis exhibited that hNSE has the excellent property of ablation area detections in the present study, whose correlation coefficient is 0.91. In conclusion, our study suggests that hNSE imaging, which does not require the specific data distribution, has the best performance in thermal ablation detections and is a promising imaging method for further clinical research and application.