Contrast and Resolution Improvement of POCUS Using Self-consistent CycleGAN

Abstract

Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) imaging can help efficient resource utilization by reducing the secondary care referrals, and work as an extension in physical examination. Recently, many methods were proposed to reduce the size and power consumption of the system while improving the visual quality, but hand-held POCUS devices still have inferior image contrast and spatial resolution compared to the high-end ultrasound systems. To address this, here we propose an efficient solution for contrast and resolution enhancement of hand-held POCUS images using unsupervised deep learning. In contrast to the existing CycleGAN approaches that have difficulty in improving both contrast and image resolutions, the proposed method mitigate the problem by decomposing the contrast transfer and resolution improvement through CycleGAN and self-supervised learning. Experimental results confirmed that our method is superior than the conventional approaches. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.