Ultrasound deep learning for wall segmentation and near-wall blood flow measurement.

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Abstract

Studies for medical flow imaging have technical limitations for accurate analysis of blood flow dynamics and vessel wall interaction at arteries. We propose deep learning-based boundary detection and compensation (DL-BDC) technique in ultrasound (US) imaging. It can segment vessel boundaries by harnessing the convolutional neural network and wall motion compensation in the analysis of near-wall flow dynamics. The network enables training from real and synthetic US images together. The performance of the technique is validated through synthetic US images and tissue-mimicking phantom experiments. The neural network performs well with a high Dice coefficient of over 0.94 and 0.9 for lumens and walls, outperforming previous segmentation techniques. Then, the performance of the wall motion compensation is examined under compliant phantoms. When DL-BDC is applied to flow influenced by wall motion, root mean square errors are less than 0.07%. The technique is utilized to analyze flow dynamics and wall interaction with varying elastic moduli of the phantoms. Results show that the flow dynamics and wall shear stress values are consistent with the expected values of the compliant phantoms, and their wall motion behavior is observed with pulse wave propagation. This strategy makes the US imaging capable of simultaneous measurement of blood flow and vessel dynamics in human arteries for their accurate interaction analysis. DL-BDC can segment vessel walls fast, accurately, and robustly. It enables to measure near-wall flow precisely by determining vessel boundary dynamics. This approach can be beneficial in flow dynamics and wall interaction analyses of various biomedical applications.