Low complexity 3D ultrasound imaging using synthetic aperture sequential beamforming

Synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB) is a technique to achieve range-independent resolution in 2D images with lower computational complexity compared to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU). It is a two stage process, wherein the first stage performs fixed-focus beamforming followed by dynamic-focus beamforming in the second stage. In this work, we extend SASB to 3D imaging and propose two schemes to reduce its complexity: (1) reducing the number of elements in both transmit and receive and (2) implementing separable beamforming in the second stage. Our Field-II simulations demonstrate that reducing transmit and receive apertures to 32×32 and 16×16 elements, respectively, and using separable beamforming reduces 3D SASB computational complexity by 15× compared to the 64×64 aperture case with almost no loss in image quality. We also describe a hardware architecture for 3D SASB that performs first-stage beamforming in the scan head, reducing the amount of data that must be transferred for offchip processing in the second stage beamformer by up to 256×. We describe an implementation approach for the second stage that performs an optimized in-place update for both steps of separable beamforming and is well suited for GPU.