在人類的所有事務中，舉凡工作、運動、休閒等，都需依靠手進行互動，倘若因故發生手部的損傷，勢必會造成人類很大程度的影響。手部肌腱的損傷在急診室中較為常見(大約占10-15%)，手部受傷後的肌腱特性是後續治療以及評估康復的程度的重要依據。近年來，有許多研究表明肌腱損傷患者的新生血管變化以及恢復程度之間存在相關的可能性，不過這些研究的目標幾乎都是較大尺寸的肌腱，如人類的阿基里斯肌腱與馬的屈肌腱等。由於人類的手指肌腱尺寸較小，因此目前臨床上還沒有適合的超音波系統用來評估手指肌腱受傷後所形成的新生血管的變化。在此本研究提出一種基於曲線結構增強的高頻超快速超音波微都卜勒成像，用於測量手指肌腱斷裂損傷患者的新生血管變化。
研究一開始，為了驗證演算法所計算出的功率都卜勒影像中血管結構的可靠性，我以小鼠的腎臟及脾臟作為微血管分布結構的驗證模型，並與常用的血流成像技術進行比較。實驗結果說明，我所提出的演算法具有較好的血管與背景的對比度及優秀的抗雜訊能力。
在人類實驗中，我對三名手指伸指總肌斷裂的患者進行了兩次的資料採集，採集間隔為四個星期。透過我所提出的演算法後得到個案的新生血管分布資訊，並將結果進行分析後與臨床用的手部功能評估參數進行比較。所有實驗結果表明，高頻超快速超音波曲線結構增強血流成像，為手部損傷後的恢復過程提供了一種具有潛力的評估方法。

The hand is a very important human tissue, in all human daily affairs, such as work, sports, leisure, etc., will communicate with the hand, so the hand injury has a great impact on human beings. Hand tendon injuries are common in emergency rooms (10-15%) [1-3], the characteristics of tendon after hand injury is an important basis for subsequent treat-ment and evaluation of recovery degree. In recent years, many studies have shown that the correlation possibility between changes in neovascularization and degree of pain and recov-ery in patients with tendon injury, the target of these studies are almost always large size tendons, e.g., human Achilles’ tendon and horse Flexor tendon, etc. Because of the small size of human finger tendons, there was currently no suitable ultrasound system in clinical that can be used to evaluate the changes of neovascularization in fingers. In this study, a high-frequency ultrafast ultrasound micro-Doppler imaging based on curvilinear structure enhancement was proposed to measure the distribution of neovascularization vessels in pa-tients with tendon rupture injury.
At the beginning of the study, in order to verify the reliability of the blood flow image obtained by the algorithm I proposed, I took the kidney and spleen of mice as the standard answer of blood vessels distribution image and compared them with common blood flow imaging techniques. It includes the global singular value decomposition (SVD) and block-wise local singular value decomposition (BWSVD) clutter filters, the background suppres-sion algorithm, the morphology-based top-hat (TH) transform and the morphology-based curvilinear structures enhancement bowler-hat (BH) transform, and the vascular structure enhancement filter based on Hessian matrix (VEF). The results show that the proposed al-gorithm has the best contrast between blood vessel and background, and high anti-noise ability in animal experiments.
In Human study, I conducted follow-up studies were performed on three patients with extensor digitorum communis (EDC) tendons rupture in the fingers, and the results of neovascularization density were compared with clinical parameters used to assess hand function. All the experimental results indicate that high-frequency ultrafast ultrasound cur-vilinear structures enhance blood flow imaging and provide a potential method of evaluat-ing the recovery process after hand injury.

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