A Cost-effective Method for Ultrasound Volumetric Imaging

A synthetic receive aperture technique is explored for cost··effective ultrasound scanners with high frame rates and beam density. The technique provides ultrasound volumetric imaging where beam count is very large with 2-D transducer arrays using subaperture processing. For every beam line, transmit beam is performed with a small subaperture whereas the reflected echo signals are received from non-overlapping subapertures. For every transmit-receive subaperture combination, a small number of beams are acquired and then the number of beam lines is increased through beam space interpolation. A 2-D linear filter with a different spatial frequency band for each subaperture is employed as the interpolation filter. Performance of the technique is analyzed through simulations. The technique reduces the number of firings and therefore allows real-time imaging with very low susceptibility to motion artifacts. Ultrasonic imaging has been an important diagnostic tool in medical applications where 2-5 MHz, 64-128 element phased array systems are used in general. In these systems, transmit and receive signal processing are performed by parallel electronic circuits. The image quality of a conventional phased array (CPA) depends on frequency and transducer array size [1]. A high quality image can be achieved using a large aperture CPA which involves increased system complexity with a high system cost [2]. System complexity is increased with the number of active parallel transmit-receive array channels. For this reason, synthetic aperture (SA) imaging can be considered as an alternate, where a small number of parallel active elements is used. In this approach, signal is sent from a subaperture with small number of elements and echo signals are acquired from small receive subapertures, and therefore electronic hardware and the power consumption is reduced. Synthetic aperture techniques allow design of low cost systems but produce poor image quality [3,4]. Data acquisition time, is critical for real-time synthetic aperture ultrasound imaging. In SA techniques each scan line must be transmitted and received once for each receive subaperture before it is stored in the digital memory. This process reduces the data acquisition rate linearly with the number of subapertures in the full array. Therefore, it is

A synthetic receive aperture technique is explored for cost••effective ultrasound scanners with high frame rates and beam density.The technique provides ultrasound volumetric imaging where beam count is very large with 2-D transducer arrays using subaperture processing.For every beam line, transmit beam is performed with a small subaperture whereas the reflected echo signals are received from non-overlapping subapertures.For every transmit-receive subaperture combination, a small number of beams are acquired and then the number of beam lines is increased through beam space interpolation.A 2-D linear filter with a different spatial frequency band for each subaperture is employed as the interpolation filter.Performance of the technique is analyzed through simulations.
The technique reduces the number of firings and therefore allows real-time imaging with very low susceptibility to motion artifacts.
Ultrasonic imaging has been an important diagnostic tool in medical applications where 2-5 MHz, 64-128 element phased array systems are used in general.In these systems, transmit and receive signal processing are performed by parallel electronic circuits.The image quality of a conventional phased array (CPA) depends on frequency and transducer array size [1].A high quality image can be achieved using a large aperture CPA which involves increased system complexity with a high system cost [2].System complexity is increased with the number of active parallel transmit-receive array channels.For this reason, synthetic aperture (SA) imaging can be considered as an alternate, where a small number of parallel active elements is used.In this approach, signal is sent from a subaperture with small number of elements and echo signals are acquired from small receive subapertures, and therefore electronic hardware and the power consumption is reduced.Synthetic aperture techniques allow design of low cost systems but produce poor image quality [3,4].
Data acquisition time, is critical for real-time synthetic aperture ultrasound imaging.In SA techniques each scan line must be transmitted and received once for each receive subaperture before it is stored in the digital memory.This process reduces the data acquisition rate linearly with the number of subapertures in the full array.Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the number of firings for the data acquisition to achieve real-time imaging [5,6,7].
I;or real-time pulse-echo imaging, a major constraint is frames/s x beamslframe x imagmg depth/frame S c/2.For 20 frames/s, 1540 m/s acoustic velocity and 20 em image depth, at most Bo=192 beam lines can be traced.According to the Nyquist sampling criterion, the total number of beams to scan a 90°sector is .J2N, where N is the number of array elements with )J2 element spacing.
We propose a subaperture technique in this work.This technique uses different subapertures each consisting of small number of parallel transmit-receive channels.For every subaperture, the number of beam lines is determined to satisfy the Nyquist criterion for that subaperture, and the number of beams are increased to the required beam number of the full synthesized aperture through digital interpolation.This subaperture processing approach allows cost-effective, real-time imaging with image quality almost identical to the phased array.
In this study, a synthetic receive aperture technique based on beam space interpolation is proposed.To scan the image space, an active subaperture is fired for every beam line and the echo signals are received from elements of an active receive subaperture in parallel.
The element count of both transmit and receive subapertures is kept small enough to reduce the system complexity.While the transmit subaperture is at the center of a large transducer array, the active receive subaperture is multiplexed on the array to collect data from non-overlapping receive subapertures.The transmit subaperture is fired to each scan angle as many as the number of receive subapertures.The acquired data are used to synthesize the large aperture.
The beam lines to scan the image space is chosen to satisfy the Nyquist criterion to a single transmit and receive subaperture combination.Following acquisition of two neighbor beams, we perform linear interpolation to increase the beam number by a factor so that the number of overall beam lines should satisfy the Nyquist criterion for the full synthesized array (Fig-l.a).
In this work, using Where, the first and second term represent I-D responses of the kl and k2'th subapertures.
In image domain, according to the Nyquist sampling criteria, spatial sampling period must be: Asin((}) ~2/(N/+KN/'), Asin(¢) S 2/(N?'+KN!).For SRA, using subaperture consists of N/ x N?, transmit, N/' x N 1 receive elements, image space is sampled over - The interpolation filter can be defined for the kl and k2'th subaperture as: where, m and n indicate the filier beam numbers along azimuth and elevation directions.High resolution image is finally formed by simply summing the K low resolution images which are composed of beams acquired from K subaperture combinations.Therefore the high resolution system becomes: To test performance of the proposed technique, psf simulations are performed using a Mills cross array configuration [8] (Fig-l.b).There are one right cross in transmit and a similar four cross oriented at 45 degrees along the diagonals in receive mode [9].In order to investigate the proposed SRA and compare with CPA, a 3,5 MHz, 128 element ultrasound imaging system is simulated digitally, where the system parameters are given in Table-I.In this study, a synthetic receive aperture technique based on spatial interpolation is presented.The technique is examined via simulations and compared to phased array.The proposed technique, uses very small number of active parallel channels and produces image quality identical to that of the phased array.It is suitable for cost-effective systems.
It can be efficiently used in volumetric imagers where beam density is a major difficulty.
n:l6 so, ¢ s n:l6, resulting the beam lines: Be ~(Nt X +N/')/2 and B; ~(N?'+N 1)/2.Then, this sampling count is increased to B/ ~(N/+KN/')/2 and B/ ~(N?'+KNI)/ 2 through digital interpolation.Since motion sensitivity necessitates shorter filier length linear interpolation filter is preferred.In order to match the filter spatial frequency band with the associated subaperture function, the phase of the filter for kl and k2'th subaperture must be taken same as that of the point spread function (Fig-I.c).
of the proposed technique is presented in Fig-2 and Fig-3 via simulations.Fig-2.ashows the zero insertion step of the digital interpolation process.Since the acquired beam number of a subaperture is less than the number of overall beam lines the suhapertures seem to be periodic in spatial frequency domain.Their sum is also shown below of the figs.For this SRA model, sampling rate is increased by a factor of Ll=L2=2.Consequently, four zeros are inserted for each subaperture.Fig-2.bshows, the equivalent subapertures after filtering and their sum.In this step, additional beam lines between two collected neighbor beams are produced by a linear filter for each subaperture in spatial frequency domain.In other words, required subaperture psf is formed in the beam space.The overall psfs of SM and CPA are given in Fig-3.a and Fig-3.b,respectively.The results show that the point and contrast resolutions of two systems are almost the same.

Table - I
:The system parameters used in the simulations.