TY - GEN

T1 - Row-Column Beamformer for Fast Volumetric Imaging

AU - Jorgensen, Lasse Thurmann

AU - Prasius, Sebastian Kazmarek

AU - Panduro, Nathalie Sarup

AU - Andersen, Sofie Bech

AU - Sorensen, Charlotte Mehlin

AU - Jensen, Jorgen Arendt

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 IEEE.

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - A row-column beamformation algorithm is presented, which yields the output from the conventional delay-and-sum algorithm while reducing the number of operations by order of magnitude. The proposed method uses that in a row-column synthetic aperture sequence, the low-resolution volumes (LRV) have approximately constant image values along the elevation axis. It is, thus, possible to reconstruct the entire LRV from a single cross-section by modeling the positions with constant image values. As such, the proposed method consists of two stages. The first stage beamforms a low-resolution image per emission using the conventional approach. The second stage reconstructs the LRVs with one interpolation per voxel. Lastly, a high-resolution volume (HRV) is obtained by summing the LRVs across all emissions. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on measured data acquired using a 6 MHz 128+128 Vermon row-column probe and a Verasonics Vantage system. The proposed method beamformed a $100 \times 100 \times 200$ HRV consisting of 48 LRVs at a volume rate of 38 Hz. This was 9.23 times faster than a published GPU implementation of the conventional approach and real-time volumetric beamformation was achieved with a pulse repetition frequency of up to 1805 Hz. The output from the conventional and proposed beamformer was visually indistinguishable, and their point spread function's width heccurate interpolation requiright at -6 dB and -20 dB deviated less than 0.5%. This demonstrates that the number of operations of the conventional row-column beamformer can be significantly reduced with a negligible impact on image quality.

AB - A row-column beamformation algorithm is presented, which yields the output from the conventional delay-and-sum algorithm while reducing the number of operations by order of magnitude. The proposed method uses that in a row-column synthetic aperture sequence, the low-resolution volumes (LRV) have approximately constant image values along the elevation axis. It is, thus, possible to reconstruct the entire LRV from a single cross-section by modeling the positions with constant image values. As such, the proposed method consists of two stages. The first stage beamforms a low-resolution image per emission using the conventional approach. The second stage reconstructs the LRVs with one interpolation per voxel. Lastly, a high-resolution volume (HRV) is obtained by summing the LRVs across all emissions. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on measured data acquired using a 6 MHz 128+128 Vermon row-column probe and a Verasonics Vantage system. The proposed method beamformed a $100 \times 100 \times 200$ HRV consisting of 48 LRVs at a volume rate of 38 Hz. This was 9.23 times faster than a published GPU implementation of the conventional approach and real-time volumetric beamformation was achieved with a pulse repetition frequency of up to 1805 Hz. The output from the conventional and proposed beamformer was visually indistinguishable, and their point spread function's width heccurate interpolation requiright at -6 dB and -20 dB deviated less than 0.5%. This demonstrates that the number of operations of the conventional row-column beamformer can be significantly reduced with a negligible impact on image quality.

KW - 3-D imaging

KW - dual stage beamformation

KW - row-column addressed arrays

KW - synthetic aperture imaging

U2 - 10.1109/ICASSPW59220.2023.10193631

DO - 10.1109/ICASSPW59220.2023.10193631

M3 - Article in proceedings

AN - SCOPUS:85168243458

SN - 979-8-3503-0262-2

SP - 1-

BT - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW),

PB - IEEE

T2 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing Workshops, ICASSPW 2023

Y2 - 4 June 2023 through 10 June 2023

ER -