TY - JOUR
T1 - High-volume-rate 3-d ultrasound imaging based on synthetic aperture sequential beamforming with chirp-coded excitation
AU - Zhou, Jian
AU - Wei, Siyuan
AU - Jintamethasawat, Rungroj
AU - Sampson, Richard
AU - Kripfgans, Oliver D.
AU - Fowlkes, J. Brian
AU - Wenisch, Thomas F.
AU - Chakrabarti, Chaitali
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/8
Y1 - 2018/8
N2 - Three-dimensional (3-D) ultrasound imaging is a promising modality for many medical applications. Unfortunately, it generates voluminous data in the front end, making it unattractive for high-volume-rate portable medical applications. We apply synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB) to greatly compress the front-end receive data. Baseline 3-D SASB has a low volume rate, because subapertures fire one by one. In this paper, we propose to increase the volume rate of 3-D SASB without degrading imaging quality through: 1) transmitting and receiving simultaneously with four subapertures and 2) using linear chirps as the excitation waveform to reduce interference. We design four linear chirps that operate on two overlapped frequency bands with chirp pairs in each band having opposite chirp rates. Direct implementation of this firing scheme results in grating lobes. Therefore, we design a sparse array that mitigates the grating lobe levels through optimizing the locations of transducer elements in the bin-based random array. Compared with the baseline 3-D SASB, the proposed method increases the volume rate from 8.56 to 34.2 volumes/s without increasing the front-end computation requirement. Field-II-based cyst simulations show that the proposed method achieves imaging quality comparable with baseline 3-D SASB in both shallow and deep regions.
AB - Three-dimensional (3-D) ultrasound imaging is a promising modality for many medical applications. Unfortunately, it generates voluminous data in the front end, making it unattractive for high-volume-rate portable medical applications. We apply synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB) to greatly compress the front-end receive data. Baseline 3-D SASB has a low volume rate, because subapertures fire one by one. In this paper, we propose to increase the volume rate of 3-D SASB without degrading imaging quality through: 1) transmitting and receiving simultaneously with four subapertures and 2) using linear chirps as the excitation waveform to reduce interference. We design four linear chirps that operate on two overlapped frequency bands with chirp pairs in each band having opposite chirp rates. Direct implementation of this firing scheme results in grating lobes. Therefore, we design a sparse array that mitigates the grating lobe levels through optimizing the locations of transducer elements in the bin-based random array. Compared with the baseline 3-D SASB, the proposed method increases the volume rate from 8.56 to 34.2 volumes/s without increasing the front-end computation requirement. Field-II-based cyst simulations show that the proposed method achieves imaging quality comparable with baseline 3-D SASB in both shallow and deep regions.
KW - 3-D ultrasound imaging
KW - chirp-coded excitation
KW - sparse array
KW - synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB)
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U2 - 10.1109/TUFFC.2018.2839085
DO - 10.1109/TUFFC.2018.2839085
M3 - Article
C2 - 29994304
AN - SCOPUS:85047206357
SN - 0885-3010
VL - 65
SP - 1346
EP - 1358
JO - IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
JF - IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
IS - 8
ER -