The Impact of Deep Learning on Ultrasound in Diagnosis and Therapy: Enhancing Clinical Decision Support, Workflow Efficiency, Quantification, Image Registration, and Real-time Assistance

This review article introduces the main concepts and architectures of deep learning networks for medical imaging tasks, such as classification, detection, segmentation, and generation. It then surveys how deep learning has been applied to ultrasound imaging for various purposes, such as image processing, diagnosis, and workflow enhancement. It covers different organs and body parts that can be imaged by ultrasound, such as liver, breast, thyroid, heart, kidney, prostate, nerve, muscle, and fetus. It also discusses how deep learning can help with view recognition, registration, and quantification, measurement, image registration for interventional guidance, and real-time assistance while scanning. Moreover, it explores how generative AI can be used in the future medical field by leveraging deep learning for ultrasound imaging, such as generating realistic and diverse images, virtual organs/patients with diseases, synthesizing missing or corrupted data and augmenting existing data for training and testing.