Next-gen ultrasound imaging by closing the perception-action loop

Introduction

Ultrasound (US) can revolutionize and democratize medical imaging if it offers:

1. Access for everyone, and
2. Excellent Image Quality (IQ).

MRI offers excellent Image Quality but is expensive and will thus not likely be able to provide access for everyone. Low-cost US hardware technology will enable access in the future but is not expected to yield the needed breakthrough for excellent Image Quality. Consequently, any paradigm-shifting advance in signal processing technology that achieves US with excellent IQ will have a huge impact.

Proposed Approach

I propose a conceptually new and highly unconventional approach that I believe can lead to a new generation of US technologies with excellent IQ. I will formally describe US systems as intelligent autonomous agents that perform actions and perception using probabilistic inference:

• The action is the acquisition, probing the world, and
• The perception is the reconstruction that infers what anatomy most likely generated the acquired US data.

Current Limitations

I conclude that current US systems are in essence flawed agents since:

1. Actions are not driven by perception, i.e., the perception-action loop is broken, and
2. Their generative perception models are naive.

My proposal will address this by closing the perception-action loop and offering strong perception models based on advanced deep generative networks. This breaks a fundamental tenet in US imaging, where I put forth the important concept that the acquisition and perception should work together to identify the point on the low-dimensional manifold of pure anatomy (described by the generative model) that is being imaged.

Intelligent US Agents

My intelligent US agents will pursue excellent IQ under the heading of a single probabilistic principle: minimization of "surprise" under the agent’s own prior belief (the generative model) that such high-quality images can indeed be achieved.

With this, we open a new frontier within active imaging (in US and beyond) where data acquisition and information processing are treated jointly based on expressive generative density functions.