Ultrasound Image Enhancement Challenge 2023

  • ONLINE MEETING on Oct. 12, 2023


Ultrasound imaging is commonly used for aiding disease diagnosis and treatment, with advantages in noninvasive. Lately, medical ultrasound shows prospects revolving from expensive big-size machines in hospitals to economical hand-held devices in wider use. The barrier is that ultrasound examination with a handheld device has the drawback of low imaging quality due to hardware limitations. Toward this, ultrasound image enhancement provides a potential low-cost solution. Restoring high-quality images from low-quality ones using computer algorithms would exempt requirements for hardware improvements and promote ultrasound device revolutions and wider applications.

We propose to hold the challenge of enhancement for ultrasound images in conjunction with MICCAI 2023. We will provide various ultrasound data of five organs, including the thyroid, carotid artery, liver, breast, and kidneyThe challenging task is reconstructing high-quality ultrasound images from low-quality ones. A total of 3000 ultrasound images (1500 pairs of low- and high-quality images) from 109 patients will be provided in the challenge.

References:

1. Zhou Z, Guo Y, Wang, Y. Handheld ultrasound video high-quality reconstruction using a low-rank representation multipathway generative adversarial network. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021, 32(2): 575-588.

2. Zhou Z, Wang Y, Guo Y, Qi Y, Yu J. Image quality improvement of hand-held ultrasound devices with a two-stage generative adversarial network. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2020, 67(1): 298-311.

3. Xia M, Yang H,  Qu Y, Guo Y,  Zhou G, Zhang FWang Y. Multilevel structure-preserved GAN for domain adaptation in intravascular ultrasound analysis. Medical Image Analysis, 2022, 82: 102614.

4. Huang L, Zhou Z, Guo Y, Wang Y. A stability-enhanced CycleGAN for effective domain transformation of unpaired ultrasound images. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 2022, 77: 103831.


News

  • [09.08] The challenge has gone to the end. Thank you for your participation. Please the participants that uploaded the final results contact us (MICCAI_USenhance2023@aliyun.com) with your team information, your rank on the leaderboard and the signed MICCAI_USenhance_Challenge_Rule_Agreement_Form before Sept. 10th. We need to verify the results and other relevant documents.
  • [08.11] The 2nd-Testing phase has been updated again. Please re-upload your results and other relevant documents. Sorry for the inconvenience.
  • [08.10] The 2nd-Testing phase has been updated. Please re-upload your results and other relevant documents. Sorry for the inconvenience.