Diffusion Reconstruction of Ultrasound Images with Informative Uncertainty

Abstract: Despite its wide use in medicine, ultrasound imaging faces several challenges related to its poor signal-to-noise ratio and several sources of noise and artefacts. Enhancing ultrasound image quality involves balancing concurrent factors like contrast, resolution, and speckle preservation. In recent years, there has been progress both in model-based and learning-based approaches to improve ultrasound image reconstruction. Bringing the best from both worlds, we propose a hybrid approach leveraging advances in diffusion models. To this end, we adapt Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models (DDRM) to incorporate ultrasound physics through a linear direct model and an unsupervised fine-tuning of the prior diffusion model. We conduct comprehensive experiments on simulated, in-vitro, and in-vivo data, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach in achieving high-quality image reconstructions from a single plane wave input and in comparison to state-of-the-art methods. Finally, given the stochastic nature of the method, we analyse in depth the statistical properties of single and multiple-sample reconstructions, experimentally show the informativeness of their variance, and provide an empirical model relating this behaviour to speckle noise. The code and data are available at: (upon acceptance).