Automatic B-line detection in paediatric lung ultrasound

B-lines, defined as discrete laser-like vertical hyperechoic reverberation artefacts in lung ultrasounds, have been shown to correlate with extravascular lung water in symptomatic and asymptomatic adults and children on dialysis. Recent studies have shown this technique to be useful in children on dialysis. B-line detection in lung ultrasound in children is novel and challenging. This paper presents a novel automatic B-line detection via an inverse problem involving the Radon transform, which is solved using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed method restores the lines in the speckle images. Then, the B-lines are automatically detected using a simple local maxima technique in the Radon transform domain, associated with some definitions of the line artefacts. The results show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods by up to 69 %.