Diverging Wave Volumetric Imaging Using Subaperture Beamforming

Santos, Pedro; Haugen, Geir; Løvstakken, Lasse; Samset, Eigil; D'hooge, Jan

doi:10.1109/tuffc.2016.2616172

Cited by 45 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…An option could be the transmission of diverging waves having narrower aperture angles to scan each plane in several (e.g. 3) consecutive transmissions [67], [68]; this would reduce both the number of lines to be reconstructed for each transmission event and the energy spread over the region of interest with benefits in terms of CR and SNR without impacting on the achievable FR in real-time.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-Frame-Rate Tri-Plane Echocardiography With Spiral Arrays: From Simulation to Real-Time Implementation

Ramalli

Harput

Bezy

et al. 2020

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

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Major cardiovascular diseases are associated with (regional) dysfunction of the left ventricle. Despite the 3D nature of the heart and its dynamics, the assessment of myocardial function is still largely based on 2D ultrasound imaging thereby making diagnosis heavily susceptible to the operator's expertise. Unfortunately, to date, 3D echocardiography cannot provide an adequate spatio-temporal resolution in real-time. Hence, triplane imaging has been introduced as a compromise between 2D and true volumetric ultrasound imaging. However, tri-plane imaging typically requires high-end ultrasound systems equipped with fully populated matrix array probes embedded with expensive and little flexible electronics for two-stage beamforming. This paper presents an advanced ultrasound system for real-time, high frame rate, tri-plane echocardiography based on low element count sparse arrays, i.e. the so-called spiral arrays. The system was simulated, experimentally validated, and implemented for real-time operation on the ULA-OP 256 system. Five different array configurations were tested together with four different scan sequences, including multi-line and planar diverging wave transmission. In particular, the former can be exploited to achieve, in tri-plane imaging, the same temporal resolution currently used in clinical 2D echocardiography, at the expenses of contrast (−3.5dB) and signal-to-noise ratio (−8.7dB). On the other hand, the transmission of planar diverging waves boosts the frame rate up to 250 Hz, but further compromises contrast (−10.5dB), signal-to-noise ratio (−9.7dB), and lateral resolution (+46%). In conclusion, despite an unavoidable loss in image quality and sensitivity due to the limited number of elements, high frame rate tri-plane imaging with spiral arrays is shown to be feasible in real-time and may enable real-time functional analysis of all left ventricular segments of the heart. Index Terms-Cardiac imaging, high frame rate imaging, 3D imaging, tri-plane echocardiography, multiline transmission, diverging waves, spiral arrays, sparse arrays, real-time.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-Frame-Rate Tri-Plane Echocardiography With Spiral Arrays: From Simulation to Real-Time Implementation

Ramalli

Harput

Bezy

et al. 2020

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

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“…It is worth noting that, as a general similarity measure metric, the proposed effective distance method can also be used in other imaging modality with the compounding process, such as the synthetic aperture imaging and diverging wave imaging [33, 34]. Further research on the application of the method will also be included in our next phase of work.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sidelobe reduction for plane wave compounding with a limited frame number

Guo

Wang

et al. 2018

BioMed Eng OnLine

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BackgroundIn ultrasound plane wave imaging (PWI), image details are often blurred by the off-axis artefacts resulting from high sidelobe. Recently plane wave compounding (PWC) is proposed as a promising technique for the sidelobe suppression in the PWI. However, its high demand for the frame number results in an obvious frame rate loss, which is intolerable in the ultrafast imaging modality. To reduce the number of frames required for compounding, coherence in the compounding frames should be exploited.MethodsIn this paper, we propose a global effective distance-based sidelobe suppressing method for the PWC with a limited frame number, where the global effective distance is introduced to measure the inter-frame coherence. Specifically, the effective distance is firstly computed by using a sparse representation-based algorithm. Then, the sidelobe localization is carried out on the basis of the effective distance. Finally, the target-dependent weighting factor is adopted to suppress the sidelobe.ResultsTo assert the superiority of our proposed method, we compare the performances of different sidelobe reduction methods on both simulated and experimental PWC data. In case of 5 steering angles, our method shows a 19 dB reduction in the peak sidelobe level compared to the normal PWC in the point spread function test, and the contrast ratio is enhanced by more than 10% in both the simulation and phantom studies.ConclusionsConsequently, the proposed method is convinced to be a promising approach in enhancing the PWC image quality.

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“…Therefore, beamforming is typically done in two phases where part of the beamforming is done in the transducer itself while the pre-beam formed signals are combined in the front-end in order to generate the individual image lines (i.e., two-stage beamforming [27]). Recently, it has been shown that severe imaging artifacts are introduced while using this technique for DWI [28]. This is due to delay errors which cause grating lobes and reduced penetration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Definition of an Anatomic Field of View for Volumetric Cardiac Motion Estimation at High Temporal Resolution

et al. 2017

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Fast volumetric cardiac imaging requires reducing the number of transmit events within a single volume. One way of achieving this is by limiting the field of view (FOV) of the recording to the myocardium when investigating cardiac mechanics. Although fully automatic solutions towards myocardial segmentation exist, translating that information in a fast ultrasound scan sequence is not trivial. In particular, multi-line transmit (MLT) scan sequences were investigated given their proven capability to increase frame rate (FR) while preserving image quality. The aim of this study was therefore to develop a methodology to automatically identify the anatomically relevant conically shaped FOV, and to translate this to the best associated MLT sequence. This approach was tested on 27 datasets leading to a conical scan with a mean opening angle of 19.7 • ± 8.5 • , while the mean "thickness" of the cone was 19 • ± 3.4 • , resulting in a frame rate gain of about 2. Then, to subsequently scan this conical volume, several MLT setups were tested in silico. The method of choice was a 10MLT sequence as it resulted in the highest frame rate gain while maintaining an acceptable cross-talk level. When combining this MLT scan sequence with at least four parallel receive beams, a total frame rate gain with a factor of approximately 80 could be obtained. As such, anatomical scan sequences can increase frame rate significantly while maintaining information of the relevant structures for functional myocardial imaging.

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Diverging Wave Volumetric Imaging Using Subaperture Beamforming

Cited by 45 publications

References 23 publications

High-Frame-Rate Tri-Plane Echocardiography With Spiral Arrays: From Simulation to Real-Time Implementation

High-Frame-Rate Tri-Plane Echocardiography With Spiral Arrays: From Simulation to Real-Time Implementation

Sidelobe reduction for plane wave compounding with a limited frame number

Automatic Definition of an Anatomic Field of View for Volumetric Cardiac Motion Estimation at High Temporal Resolution

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