Contrast-Enhanced Ultra-Sound (CEUS) has become a viable method for non-invasive, dynamic visualization in medical diagnostics, yet Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) has enabled a revolutionary breakthrough by offering ten times higher resolution. To date, Delay-And-Sum (DAS) beamformers are used to render ULM frames, ultimately determining the image resolution capability. To take full advantage of ULM, this study questions whether beamforming is the most effective processing step for ULM, suggesting an alternative approach that relies solely on Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDoA) information. To this end, a novel geometric framework for micro bubble localization via ellipse intersections is proposed to overcome existing beamforming limitations. We present a benchmark comparison based on a public dataset for which our geometric ULM outperforms existing baseline methods in terms of accuracy and reliability while only utilizing a portion of the available transducer data.

翻译：对比增强超声（CEUS）已成为医学诊断中无创、动态可视化的可行方法，而超声定位显微镜（ULM）通过提供十倍更高的分辨率实现了革命性突破。目前，延迟叠加（DAS）波束成形器用于生成ULM帧，最终决定了图像分辨率能力。为充分利用ULM，本研究质疑波束成形是否为ULM最有效的处理步骤，提出一种仅依赖到达时间差（TDoA）信息的替代方法。为此，提出了一种基于椭圆交点的微泡定位新型几何框架，以克服现有波束成形的局限性。我们基于公开数据集进行了基准对比，结果表明：我们的几何ULM在仅使用部分换能器数据的情况下，在精度和可靠性方面均优于现有基线方法。