A log-domain /spl mu/beamformer for medical ultrasound imaging systems

Halvorsrod, T.; Luzi, W.; Lande, Tor Sverre

doi:10.1109/tcsi.2005.857544

Cited by 23 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…However, all of them suffer from reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), due to the reduced active area, and they introduce higher sidelobes and/or grating lobes. Recently, fully populated arrays with reduced channel count have become available by integrating electronic pre-beamformers inside the transducer probe [9][10][11]. Approaches to include the integrated circuit (IC) directly on a capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) has also been investigated, both by flip-chip bonding the CMUT to the IC [12][13][14] and by monolithically integrating the CMUT on the CMOS [15,16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probe development of CMUT and PZT row–column-addressed 2-D arrays

Engholm

Bouzari

Christiansen

et al. 2018

Sensors and Actuators A: Physical

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This paper presents the characterization of two prototyped fully integrated 62+62 row-column-addressed (RCA) 2-D transducer array probes, which are based on capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) and on piezoelectric transducer (PZT) technology, respectively. Both transducers have integrated apodization to reduce ghost echoes and were designed with similar acoustical features i.e. 3 MHz center frequency, λ /2-pitch and 24.8 × 24.8 mm 2 active footprint. The transducer arrays were assembled in a 3-D printed probe handle with electromagnetic shield and integrated electronics for driving the 128-channel coaxial cable to the scanner. The electronics were designed to allow all elements, both rows and columns, to be used interchangeably as either transmitters or receivers. The transducer characterization i.e. bandwidth, phase delay, surface pressure, sensitivity, insertion loss, and acoustical crosstalk, were based on several single element measurements, including pressure and pulse-echo, and were evaluated quantitatively and comparatively. The weighted center frequency was 3.0 MHz for both probes and the measured −6 dB fractional bandwidth was 109 ± 4% and 80 ± 3% for the CMUT and the PZT probe, respectively. The surface pressures of the CMUT and PZT were 0.55 ± 0.06 MPa and 1.68 ± 0.09 MPa, respectively, and the receive sensitivities of the rows (receiving elements) were 12.9 ± 0.7 µV/Pa and 13.7 ± 2.1 µV/Pa.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probe development of CMUT and PZT row–column-addressed 2-D arrays

Engholm

Bouzari

Christiansen

et al. 2018

Sensors and Actuators A: Physical

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“…However, a major limiting factor that prevents this class of techniques from being widely used in clinical practice is the cost and complexities associated with the 2D transducers: the number of transducer elements is typically on the order of 10 3 to 10 4 , which needs a system with high channel count to operate, is challenging to fabricate, and computationally costly to conduct beamforming and post-processing. Although some of these challenges can be mitigated by instrumentation and computational innovations such as multiplexing, microbeamforming [16][17][18], parallel beamforming, and novel arrays such as sparse arrays [19][20][21] and row-column-addressing (RCA) arrays [22][23][24], a viable solution that provides both high imaging quality and high 3D imaging volume rate remains elusive until today.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast Acoustic Steering Via Tilting Electromechanical Reflectors (FASTER): A Novel Method for High Volume Rate 3-D Ultrasound Imaging

Dong

Lowerison

et al. 2021

IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr.

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Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging is essential for a wide range of clinical applications in diagnostic and interventional cardiology, radiology, and obstetrics for prenatal imaging. 3D ultrasound imaging is also pivotal for advancing technical developments of emerging imaging technologies such as elastography, blood flow imaging, functional ultrasound (fUS), and super-resolution microvessel imaging. At present, however, existing 3D ultrasound imaging methods suffer from low imaging volume rate, suboptimal imaging quality, and high costs associated with 2D ultrasound transducers. Here we report a novel 3D ultrasound imaging technique, Fast Acoustic Steering via Tilting Electromechanical Reflectors (FASTER), which provides both high imaging quality and fast imaging speed while at low-cost. Capitalizing upon a unique water-immersible and fast-tilting micro-fabricated mirror to scan ultrafast plane waves in the elevational direction, FASTER is capable of high volume rate, large field-of-view (FOV) 3D imaging with conventional 1D transducers. In this paper, we introduce the fundamental concepts of FASTER and present a series of calibration and validation studies for FASTER 3D imaging. In a wire phantom and tissuemimicking phantom study, we demonstrated that FASTER was capable of providing spatially accurate 3D images with a 500 Hz imaging volume rate and an imaging FOV with a range of 48 degrees (20 mm at 25 mm depth) in the elevational direction. We also showed that FASTER had comparable imaging quality with conventional mechanical translation-based 3D imaging. The principles and results presented in this study establish the technical foundation for the new paradigm of high volume rate 3D ultrasound imaging based on ultrafast plane waves and fast-tilting, water-immersible micro-fabricated mirrors. Index Terms-Three-dimensional ultrasound, waterimmersible micro-fabricated mirror, plane wave imaging, high volume rate.

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“…This is the main approach used in high-end commercial systems. It, however, leads to challenges with probe heating, 6 while providing lower image quality than the fully addressed array.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Row-column beamforming with dynamic apodizations on a GPU

Stuart¹,

Schou²,

Jensen³

2019

Medical Imaging 2019: Ultrasonic Imaging and Tomography

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A delay-and-sum beamformer implementation for 3D imaging with row-column arrays is presented. It is written entirely in the MATLAB programming language for flexible use and fast modifications for research use, and all parts can run on either the CPU or GPU. Dynamic apodization with row-column arrays is presented and is supported in both transmit and receive. Delay calculations are simplified compared to previous beamformers, and 3D delay and apodization calculations are reduced to 2D problems for faster calculations. The performance is evaluated on an Intel Xeon E5-2630 v4 CPU with 64 GB RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU with 11 GB RAM. A 192+192 array is simulated to image a volume of 96-by-96-by-45 wavelengths sampled at 0.3 wavelength in the axial direction and 0.5 wavelength in the lateral and elevation directions giving 5.53 million sample points. A single-element synthetic aperture sequence with 192 emissions is used. The 192 volumes are beamformed in approximately 1 hour on the CPU and 5 minutes on the GPU corresponding to a speed-up of up to 12.2 times. For a smaller beamforming problem consisting of the three center planes in the volume, a speed-up of 4.6 times is found from 109 to 24 seconds. The GPU utilization is around 5.0% of the possible floating point calculations indicating a trade-off between the easy programming approach and high performance.

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A log-domain /spl mu/beamformer for medical ultrasound imaging systems

Cited by 23 publications

References 16 publications

Probe development of CMUT and PZT row–column-addressed 2-D arrays

Probe development of CMUT and PZT row–column-addressed 2-D arrays

Fast Acoustic Steering Via Tilting Electromechanical Reflectors (FASTER): A Novel Method for High Volume Rate 3-D Ultrasound Imaging

Row-column beamforming with dynamic apodizations on a GPU

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