A Very Large Cardiac Channel Data Database (VLCD) used to Evaluate
Global Image Coherence (GIC) as an In-Vivo Image Quality Metric
Abstract
Ultrasound image quality is of utmost importance for a clinician to
reach a correct diagnosis. Conventionally, image quality is evaluated
using metrics to determine the contrast and resolution. These metrics
requires localization of specific regions and targets in the image such
as a region of interest (ROI), a background region, and or, a point
scatterer. Such objects can all be difficult to identify in in-vivo
images, especially for automatic evaluation of image quality in large
amounts of data.
Using a matrix array probe, we have recorded a Very Large cardiac
Channel data Database (VLCD) to evaluate coherence as an in-vivo image
quality metric. The VLCD consists of 33 280 individual image frames
from 538 recordings of 106 patients. We also introduce a Global Image
Coherence (GIC), an in-vivo image quality metric that does not require
any identified ROI since it is defined as an average coherence value
calculated from all the data pixels used to form the image, below a
pre-selected range. The GIC is shown to be a quantitative metric for
in-vivo image quality when applied to the VLCD. We demonstrate, on a
subset of the dataset, that the GIC correlates well with the
conventional metrics contrast ratio (CR) and the generalized
contrast-to-noise ratio (gCNR) with R=0.74 (p<0.005) and
R=0.62 (p<0.005) respectively.
There exists multiple methods to estimate the coherence of the received
signal across the ultrasound array. We further show that all coherence
measures investigated in this study are highly correlated
(R>0.9, p<0.001) when applied to the VLCD. Thus,
even though there are differences in the implementation of coherence
measures, all quantify the similarity of the signal across the array and
can be averaged into a GIC to evaluate image quality automatically and
quantitatively.