Enhanced Shrinking Reconstruction for Ultrasound Super-resolution Imaging with High Microbubble Concentration

Low signal-to-noise ratio and high microbubble concentration are unignorable challenges in ultrasound super-resolution imaging in clinical application. Inspired by optical super-resolution microscopy Entropy-based Super-resolution Imaging and Super-Resolution Radial Fluctuations, we introduce a non-localization-based ultrasound super-resolution strategy termed as Enhanced Shrinking Reconstruction, which utilizes entropy analysis of temporal intensity fluctuations and spatial radial symmetry estimation for super-resolution imaging. To validate the feasibility of proposed strategy, vasculature was imaged in the biceps of Japanese long-ear white rabbits using clinical ultrasound system and a single bolus injection of microbubbles. We exhibit improved fidelity and continuity compared with ultrasound localization microscopy mainly due to effective noise suppression, point spread function shrinkage and microbubble separation. We believe the proposed strategy could bring new insights for ultrasound super-resolution imaging in clinical.