A Fast and Robust Super Resolution Method for Intima Reconstruction in Medical Ultrasound

Accurate measurement of intima-media thickness (IMT) in ultrasound images is clinically meaningful but also difficult because of low resolution. This paper proposes an approach to reconstruct a resolution-enhanced intima from a sequence of acquired images using a maximum a-posteriori framework. Anisotropic diffusion is used to reduce speckle with edge enhancement during reconstruction. For real time application in an ultrasound system, a fast and robust approach is employed in the presence of outliers. Finally, an iterative process is used to achieve a single high-resolution image with a better defined intima boundary than the original images. Our approach may be a valuable preprocessing step to image segmentation and IMT measurement.