In addition to structural morphology, tissue’s vascular network may provide valuable complementary information on the altered lesions and the tumor angiogenesis. Although ultrafast Doppler ultrasound (UDF) imaging enables ultrasound to image microvessels with high sensitivity, these images still suffer from artifacts. In this study, we addressed small vessel visualization and associated noise problem in ultrasound high framerate plane wave in-vivo imaging. We developed a combination of nonlocal means and morphological filtering on the UDF clutter removed data in order to obtain enhanced vessel images and improved outlining. We tested our algorithm on a flow phantom and in vivo data of the breast masses. The results show that the proposed method added an incremental gain of about 16 dB in terms of signal to noise ratio and has potential to facilitate ultrasound small vessel imaging quantification.
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