High dynamic range ultrasound imaging.

Purpose: High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a popular computational photography technique that has found its way into every modern smartphone and camera. In HDR imaging, images acquired at different exposures are combined to increase the luminance range of the final image, thereby extending the limited dynamic range of the camera. Ultrasound imaging suffers from limited dynamic range as well; at higher power levels, the hyperechogenic tissue is overexposed, whereas at lower power levels, hypoechogenic tissue details are not visible. In this work, we apply HDR techniques to ultrasound imaging, where we combine ultrasound images acquired at different power levels to improve the level of detail visible in the final image.

Methods: Ultrasound images of ex vivo and in vivo tissue are acquired at different acoustic power levels and then combined to generate HDR ultrasound (HDR-US) images. The performance of five tone mapping operators is quantitatively evaluated using a similarity metric to determine the most suitable mapping for HDR-US imaging.

Results: The ex vivo and in vivo results demonstrated that HDR-US imaging enables visualizing both hyper- and hypoechogenic tissue at once in a single image. The Durand tone mapping operator preserved the most amount of detail across the dynamic range.

Conclusions: Our results strongly suggest that HDR-US imaging can improve the utility of ultrasound in image-based diagnosis and procedure guidance.