Study On Brain Glioma Imaging Based On Compounded Plane Wave Ultrasound

Gliomas constitute about 80% of all malignant brain tumor.They are highly vascular tumors that cause major morbidity and mortality due to their extreme aggressiveness and strong infiltration.Based on the previous research,the aggressiveness and metastasis of an in-vivo tumor depend on angiogenesis which is closely related to its growth,staging and prognosis.Although surgical resection is considered the optimal treatment,surgery is particularly challenging due to the complex anatomy of such tumors,including the surrounding vasculature and the relationship to functional structures.The tumor may be located within or adjacent to neural areas providing critical language and motor functions,which makes it difficult to balance extensive resection with avoiding new deficits or neurological sequelae.Therefore,imaging guidance for providing information about vessel orientations and tumor boundaries is crucial during the surgery to avoid both major brain damage and recurrence.All the available imaging guidance modalities,such as Magnetic resonance imaging(MRI),are routinely used to distinguish the area of a glioma,but it cannot resolve details of the vascular network around or inside the tumor.Therefore,it’s important to provide imaging guidance for vascular structure in tumor resection.Ultrasound is a real-time and safe medical imaging modality.The recently developed method of plane-wave-based power Doppler ultrasound flow imaging,which can obtain a whole image with one scan,has highly increased the sensitivity of microflow measurement and the imaging frame rate by transmitting and receiving parallel data with all the array elements synchronously.Then it can make up the disadvantage that the image contrast and resolution are low in single-angle plane wave imaging by compounding multi-angle plane wave.Here,we proposed the multi-angle plane wave coherent compounding Doppler flow imaging to visualize and analyze the distribution of blood flow of the glioma with high resolution.Both quantification analyses and histology comparisons verified the feasibility of using this plane-wave-based Doppler imaging method to evaluate brain tumors in small animals.In order a more intuitive analysis,we also reconstruct the 3D structure of the cerebral blood flow.Although the plane wave compounding imaging method has obtained a good whole cerebral blood flow,the resolution of the image is still limited by the diffraction limit.On this basis,we also attempted to use the super-resolution imaging technology to improve the resolution,which uses the high-frame-rate ultrasound to capture the microbubbles in vivo.Because of the specific characteristics,including strong signal,low spatial coherence and high correlation,it’s possible to locate the microbubbles in the image and the vascular structure was obtained by superimposing multi-frame images.In this study,the superresolution technology has been preliminarily realized in phantom and in vivo experiments.The next step is to obtain the super-resolution image of the brain glioma to help to analyze the vascular characteristics.