Single artery perfusion imaging using focus-flash contrast-enhanced ultrasound

Single artery perfusion imaging has been an important path to study vascular diseases. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) technology, as the gold standard for clinical vascular imaging in clinical, is invasive and radioactive. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) is widely used for blood pool imaging. However, the CEUS cannot estimate the structure and perfusion of a single vessel as the DSA does. This paper proposes a new method that can non-invasively label specific vessels and obtain corresponding CEUS images at the same time, which we term as the focus-flash contrast-enhanced ultrasound (FFCEUS). Through a subtraction between the normal CEUS images and the FFCEUS images, we obtain a downstream perfusion image of the labeled artery, which we termed as the ultrasound digital subtraction angiography (UDSA).