A Paired Point-of-Care Ultrasound Dataset for Image Quality Enhancement and Benchmarking via a cGAN Baseline

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: van Karnenbeek, Lennard M., van der Pol, Hilde G. A., Wijkhuizen, Mark, Poelman, Eva, Drukker, Caroline A., Ruers, Theo, Geldof, Freija, Dashtbozorg, Behdad
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author van Karnenbeek, Lennard M.
van der Pol, Hilde G. A.
Wijkhuizen, Mark
Poelman, Eva
Drukker, Caroline A.
Ruers, Theo
Geldof, Freija
Dashtbozorg, Behdad
author_facet van Karnenbeek, Lennard M.
van der Pol, Hilde G. A.
Wijkhuizen, Mark
Poelman, Eva
Drukker, Caroline A.
Ruers, Theo
Geldof, Freija
Dashtbozorg, Behdad
contents Purpose: We aim to enhance the image quality of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) devices using deep learning and a novel paired dataset of POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. Approach: We collected the first accurately paired dataset using a custom-built automated gantry system of low-end POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. A conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) was utilized based on the pix2pix architecture, with a U-Net generator that incorporates both L1 and structural similarity index (SSIM) losses to improve perceptual quality. Pretraining on a simulation dataset further boosts performance. Evaluation was performed on 1064 paired ex vivo tissue and phantom ultrasound image sets. Results: Our approach improves the SSIM from 0.29 to 0.54 and PSNR from 19.16 dB to 22.41 dB. No-reference metrics also indicate substantial enhancement, with the Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) and Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQE) scores dropping from 7.95 to 4.44 and 31.12 to 19.99, respectively. Conclusions: This work presents the first publicly available accurately paired dataset of low-end POCUS to high end ultrasound images. Additionally, our results demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework to overcome hardware limitations of handheld POCUS, enhancing its diagnostic value in low-resource and point-of-care settings. The POCUS-IQ Dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/NKI-MedTech-AI/POCUS-IQ.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08282
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Paired Point-of-Care Ultrasound Dataset for Image Quality Enhancement and Benchmarking via a cGAN Baseline
van Karnenbeek, Lennard M.
van der Pol, Hilde G. A.
Wijkhuizen, Mark
Poelman, Eva
Drukker, Caroline A.
Ruers, Theo
Geldof, Freija
Dashtbozorg, Behdad
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Purpose: We aim to enhance the image quality of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) devices using deep learning and a novel paired dataset of POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. Approach: We collected the first accurately paired dataset using a custom-built automated gantry system of low-end POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. A conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) was utilized based on the pix2pix architecture, with a U-Net generator that incorporates both L1 and structural similarity index (SSIM) losses to improve perceptual quality. Pretraining on a simulation dataset further boosts performance. Evaluation was performed on 1064 paired ex vivo tissue and phantom ultrasound image sets. Results: Our approach improves the SSIM from 0.29 to 0.54 and PSNR from 19.16 dB to 22.41 dB. No-reference metrics also indicate substantial enhancement, with the Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) and Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQE) scores dropping from 7.95 to 4.44 and 31.12 to 19.99, respectively. Conclusions: This work presents the first publicly available accurately paired dataset of low-end POCUS to high end ultrasound images. Additionally, our results demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework to overcome hardware limitations of handheld POCUS, enhancing its diagnostic value in low-resource and point-of-care settings. The POCUS-IQ Dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/NKI-MedTech-AI/POCUS-IQ.
title A Paired Point-of-Care Ultrasound Dataset for Image Quality Enhancement and Benchmarking via a cGAN Baseline
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08282