12A-3 A New Real-Time High-Frequency Subharmonic Contrast Mode for Mouse Imaging

Current commercial high-frequency (HF) imaging systems detect microbubble contrast agents in small animals using a fundamental frequency post-processing image-subtraction technique; however, the contrast enhancement is limited. Previous reports have shown the feasibility of HF subharmonic (SH) imaging, but have only been conducted with isolated non-consecutive image frames and in 2D mode. The motivation for this study is to implement and investigate a real-time HF 2D/3D SH imaging mode with the capability of high speed sequential image acquisition which can be used to track enhancement dynamics. In vivo results compare both fundamental and SH real-time image sequences and 3D images acquired with fast scanning.