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

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.