Super-resolution Clinical Brain Ultrasound

Transcranial Doppler ultrasonography with injection of contrast agent (intravenously to enhance the ultrasound signal) is a non-invasive technique that has been used for years to study intracranial vessels that constitute the polygon of Willis. However, this technique does not allow good visualization of small vessels, such as perforating arteries. Ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM) is based on the principle of localizing injected microbubbles in order to follow their movement to map the microvascular structure. The concentration of these microbubbles must remain low (in contrast to its classical use in Doppler ultrasound) in order to isolate and localize them. By using the same images as those performed in clinical routine by Doppler ultrasound and by processing the data offline, ULM would increase the resolution by a factor of 10 allowing potential observation of perforating arteries.