Row-Column Beamformer for Fast Volumetric Imaging

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW),
PublisherIEEE
Publication date2023
Pages1-
ISBN (Print)979-8-3503-0262-2
ISBN (Electronic)979-8-3503-0261-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing Workshops, ICASSPW 2023 - Rhodes Island, Greece
Duration: 4 Jun 202310 Jun 2023

Conference

Conference2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing Workshops, ICASSPW 2023
LandGreece
ByRhodes Island
Periode04/06/202310/06/2023
SponsorIEEE, IEEE Signal Processing Society

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.

    Research areas

  • 3-D imaging, dual stage beamformation, row-column addressed arrays, synthetic aperture imaging

ID: 379088673