Adaptive field-of-view imaging for efficient receive beamforming in medical ultrasound imaging systems

Quadrature demodulation-based phase rotation beamforming (QD-PRBF) is commonly used to support dynamic receive focusing in medical ultrasound systems. However, it is computationally demanding since it requires two demodulation filters for each receive channel. To reduce the computational requirements of QD-PRBF, we have previously developed two-stage demodulation (TSD), which reduces the number of lowpass filters by performing demodulation filtering on summation signals. However, it suffers from image quality degradation due to aliasing at lower beamforming frequencies. To improve the performance of TSD-PRBF with reduced number of beamforming points, we propose a new adaptive field-of-view (AFOV) imaging method. In AFOV imaging, the beamforming frequency is adjusted depending on displayed FOV size and the center frequency of received signals. To study its impact on image quality, simulation was conducted using Field II, phantom data were acquired from a commercial ultrasound machine, and the image quality was quantified using spatial (i.e., axial and lateral) and contrast resolution. The developed beamformer (i.e., TSD-AFOV-PRBF) with 1024 beamforming points provided comparable image resolution to QD-PRBF for typical FOV sizes (e.g., 4.6% and 1.3% degradation in contrast resolution for 160 mm and 112 mm, respectively for a 3.5 MHz transducer). Furthermore, it reduced the number of operations by 86.8% compared to QD-PRBF. These results indicate that the developed TSD-AFOV-PRBF can lower the computational requirement for receive beamforming without significant image quality degradation.     

In vitro estimation of mean sound speed based on minimum average phase variance in medical ultrasound imaging

Effective receive beamforming in medical ultrasound imaging is important for enhancing spatial and contrast resolution. In current ultrasound receive beamforming, a constant sound speed (e.g., 1540 m/s) is assumed. However, the variations of sound speed in soft tissues could introduce phase distortions, leading to degradation in spatial and contrast resolution. This degradation becomes even more severe in imaging fatty tissues (e.g., breast) and with obese patients. In this paper, a mean sound speed estimation method where phase variance of radio-frequency channel data in the region of interest is evaluated is presented for improving spatial and contrast resolution. The proposed estimation method was validated by the Field II simulation and the tissue mimicking phantom experiments. In the simulation, the sound speed of the medium was set to 1450 m/s and the proposed method was capable of capturing this value correctly. From the phantom experiments, the −18-dB lateral resolution of the point target at 50 mm obtained with the estimated mean sound speed was improved by a factor of 1.3, i.e., from 3.9 mm to 2.9 mm. The proposed estimation method also provides an improvement of 0.4 in the contrast-to-noise ratio, i.e., from 2.4 to 2.8. These results indicate that the proposed mean sound speed estimation method could enhance the spatial and contrast resolution in the medical ultrasound imaging systems.     

宽带波束形成器的设计与实现（英文）

The designs and implementations of broadband beamformers are reviewed and discussed.Broadband beamformer includes discrete Fourier transform(DFT) implementation of a frequency-domain beamformer and finite impulse response(FIR) implementation of a timedomain beamformer.The designs of weights at each frequency bin for the DFT beamformer and that of FIR filters associated with each sensor for the FIR beamformer are both introduced.Performance analysis and comparisons for several typical approaches to them are presented.A unified approach,i.e.,multiple-constrained approach,to narrowband beamformer is provided and is extended to the FIR implementation of broadband case.The unified approaches include the existing individual approaches as their special cases,which leads to much more flexible designs.Design examples of broadband robust adaptive beamformer with constant mainlobe response and controlled sidelobes are given to illustrate the behavior.     

New demodulation filter in digital phase rotation beamforming

In this paper, we present a new quadrature demodulation filter to reduce hardware complexity in digital phase rotation beamforming. Due to its low sensitivity to phase delay errors, digital quadrature demodulation is commonly used in ultrasound machines. However, since it requires two lowpass filters for each channel to remove harmonics, the direct use of conventional finite impulse response (FIR) filters in ultrasound machines is computationally expensive and burdensome. In our new method, an efficient multi-stage uniform coefficient (MSUC) filter is utilized to remove harmonic components in phase rotation beamforming. In comparison with the directly implemented FIR (DI-FIR) and the previously-proposed signed-power-of-two FIR (SPOT-FIR) lowpass filters, the proposed MSUC filter reduces the necessary hardware resources by 93.9% and 83.9%, respectively. In simulation, the MSUC filter shows a negligible degradation in image quality. The proposed method resulted in comparable spatial and contrast resolution to the DI-FIR approach in the phantom study. These preliminary results indicate that the proposed quadrature demodulation filtering method could significantly reduce the hardware complexity in phase rotation beamforming while maintaining comparable image quality.     

A method of improving overall resolution in ultrasonic array imaging using spatio-temporal deconvolution

In this paper a beamforming method for ultrasonic array imaging is presented that performs both spatial and temporal deconvolution based on a minimum mean square error (MMSE) criteria. The presented MMSE receive mode beamformer performs a regularized inversion of the propagation operator for the ultrasonic array system at hand. The MMSE beamformer accounts for the transmit and receive processes, defined in terms of finite array element sizes, transmit focusing laws and electrical transducer characteristics. The MMSE beamformer is compared to the traditional delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer with respect to both resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. The two algorithms are compared using both simulated and measured data. The simulated data was obtained using ultrasonic field simulations and the measured data was acquired using a linear phased array imaging wire targets in water. The results show that the MMSE beamformer has superior temporal and lateral resolution compared to DAS. It is also shown that the MMSE beamformer can be expressed as a filter bank, which enables parallel processing at high frame rates.     

水下声成像中旁瓣抑制方法及其实验研究

提出了一种近场条件下采用不等间隔阵并进行孔径变迹处理的水下声成像旁瓣抑制方法,并进行了理论和实验研究。考虑以球面波传播理论为基础的聚焦波束形成,首先通过阵元位置微调,设计了可实现低旁瓣的不等间隔阵,从单程波束响应上降低旁瓣;然后,将孔径变迹处理方法应用于水下声成像中,全部阵元用于接收,部分阵元用于发射,从双程波束响应上进一步降低旁瓣。通过水池实验对所提出的方法进行了验证。结果表明:采用不等间隔阵并进行孔径变迹处理可以更为有效地降低旁瓣,而主瓣仅有小量展宽,且该方法工程应用简便易行,在改善成像质量的同时降低了系统复杂度。      

二维解卷积波束形成水下高分辨三维声成像

针对水下三维成像的空间分辨率难以提高,且具有较高旁瓣级的问题,提出了一种二维解卷积波束形成高分辨三维声成像算法,该算法首先完成任意距离切片的平面阵波束形成,近场情况下采用菲涅尔近似实现近场平面阵波束形成,然后通过二维解卷积技术对任意距离切片的二维波束形成结果进行解卷积处理,去除阵列指向性函数的影响,改善波束响应非理想冲击函数所造成波束形成主瓣宽及旁瓣级高的问题。通过计算机仿真分析,新算法可以有效的提高水下三维成像的空间分辨率,抑制旁瓣级,并能够在较宽频带和不同阵列孔径内保持与常规波束形成相当的稳定性。通过试验研究,新方法比常规波束形成实际目标成像分辨率提高一倍,最高旁瓣级下降20 dB,验证了该算法在实际系统中的有效性.      

Design of broadband beamformers based on an expected response interpolation technique

A method for designing broadband beamformers based on an expected response interpolation technique was proposed, with the aim of reducing the heavy optimization burden in the broadband beamformer design problem. In the method, some typical frequencies in the designing frequency band are selected and the optimal array weights are designed on these typical frequencies, based on which a broadband expected response function is constructed. Then, FIR filters are designed to realize the broadband beamforming over the whole designing frequency band, via the interpolation technique which is utilized to the expected responses of the FIR filters. Broadband beamforming can be fulfilled by applying these filters to each of the sensors in the array. By using the proposed method, designers need not to divide the whole designing frequency band into narrow subbands so as to make the narrow band assumption valid, which not only reduces the heavy designing burden, but also releases the requirement for measurements at fine frequency grids in the robust beamformer design. Results of both computer simulations and watertank experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Eigenspace-based minimum variance beamformer combined with Wiener postfilter for medical ultrasound imaging

In this paper, a new beamformer which combines the eigenspace-based minimum variance (ESBMV) beamformer with the Wiener postfilter is proposed for medical ultrasound imaging. The primary goal of this work is to further improve the medical ultrasound imaging quality on the basis of the ESBMV beamformer. In this method, we optimize the ESBMV weights with a Wiener postfilter. With the optimization of the Wiener postfilter, the output power of the new beamformer becomes closer to the actual signal power at the imaging point than the ESBMV beamformer. Different from the ordinary Wiener postfilter, the output signal and noise power needed in calculating the Wiener postfilter are estimated respectively by the orthogonal signal subspace and noise subspace constructed from the eigenstructure of the sample covariance matrix.We demonstrate the performance of the new beamformer when resolving point scatterers and cyst phantom using both simulated data and experimental data and compare it with the delay-and-sum (DAS), the minimum variance (MV) and the ESBMV beamformer. We use the full width at half maximum (FWHM) and the peak-side-lobe level (PSL) to quantify the performance of imaging resolution and the contrast ratio (CR) to quantify the performance of imaging contrast. The FWHM of the new beamformer is only 15%, 50% and 50% of those of the DAS, MV and ESBMV beamformer, while the PSL is 127.2 dB, 115 dB and 60 dB lower. What is more, an improvement of 239.8%, 232.5% and 32.9% in CR using simulated data and an improvement of 814%, 1410.7% and 86.7% in CR using experimental data are achieved compared to the DAS, MV and ESBMV beamformer respectively. In addition, the effect of the sound speed error is investigated by artificially overestimating the speed used in calculating the propagation delay and the results show that the new beamformer provides better robustness against the sound speed errors. Therefore, the proposed beamformer offers a better performance than the DAS, MV and ESBMV beamformer, showing its potential in medical ultrasound imaging.     

Coded tissue harmonic imaging with nonlinear chirp signals

Coded tissue harmonic imaging with pulse inversion (CTHI-PI) based on a linear chirp signal can improve the signal-to-noise ratio with minimizing the peak range sidelobe level (PRSL), which is the main advantage over CTHI with bandpass filtering (CTHI-BF). However, the CTHI-PI technique could suffer from motion artifacts due to decreasing frame rate caused by two firings of opposite phase signals for each scanline. In this paper, a new CTHI method based on a nonlinear chirp signal (CTHI-NC) is presented, which can improve the separation of fundamental and harmonic components without sacrificing frame rate. The nonlinear chirp signal is designed to minimize the PRSL value by optimizing its frequency sweep rate and time duration. The performance of the CTHI-NC method was evaluated by measuring the PRSL and mainlobe width after compression. From the in vitro experiments, the CTHI-NC provided the PRSL of −40.6 dB and the mainlobe width of 2.1 μs for the transmit quadratic nonlinear chirp signal with the center frequency of 2.1 MHz, the fractional bandwidth at −6 dB of 0.6 and the time duration of 15 μs. These results indicate that the proposed method could be used for improving frame rates in CTHI while providing comparable image quality to CTHI-PI.     

High-resolution deconvolved beamforming for three-dimensional imaging sonars

Three-dimensional(3D) imaging sonars based on the conventional beamforming(CBF) suffers from relatively wide main-lobes and high sidelobe level.To improve the spatial resolution of 3D imaging sonars,a deconvolved beamforming method is proposed with the iterative Richardson-Lucy algorithm in this paper.At first,each distance slice can be processed to obtain images by the CBF.For the near field,the Fresnel approximation is used.Then,the deconvolution technique is applied to the CBF outputs to obtain high-resolution images and suppress the sidelobe level.The simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to improve the spatial resolution significantly and suppress the sidelobes for 3D imaging sonars.Meanwhile,the algorithm shows similar robustness with the CBF in the case of wideband and sparse array.The priority of the proposed algorithm is also validated by the tank experiment data.The presented results indicate that the spatial resolution is increased by one time and the average sidelobe level is reduced by 20 dB.     

宽带恒定束宽波束形成器的设计与实现

本文提出了一种设计宽带恒定束宽波束形成器的方法,这对应用于海底探测和分类问题的声纳系统来说十分重要,对于给定频带宽度的信号,选择一定数量的频率点来表达其频率响应,对于一个给定的频点,可以通过现有方法导出满足恒定宽要求的加权矢量,例如对于一个线阵列,可用切比雪夫多项多得到其加权矢量,因此对于一个具有Ｎ个阵元的宽带阵,如果选择Ｍ个频率点,可以得到一个ＮＭ的加权矩阵,这个矩阵的每一行代表一个阵元的频率响     

特征空间和符号相干系数融合的最小方差超声波束形成

为了提高医学超声成像的空间分辨率,提出一种融合了特征空间最小方差与符号相干系数的波束形成方法。首先利用最小方差法计算回波数据的协方差矩阵和加权向量;然后对协方差矩阵进行特征分解得到信号子空间,并将加权向量投影到该空间上;最后计算符号相干系数,用于优化特征空间法得到的回波信号,最终获得超声成像数据。为验证算法的有效性,对医学超声成像中常用的点目标、斑目标进行仿真,对点目标仿体和人体颈动脉组织进行超声成像实验。结果表明:所提出的方法在分辨率、对比度以及稳健性等方面都优于传统的延时叠加算法、最小方差算法、特征空间最小方差法以及特征空间与相干系数融合的方法。      

Multichannel silicon WDM ring filters fabricated with DUV lithography

We have fabricated 9-channel silicon wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) ring filters using 193 nm deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography and investigated the spectral properties of the ring filters by comparing the transmission spectra with and without an upper cladding. The average channel-spacing of the 9-channel WDM ring filter with a polymeric upper cladding is measured about 1.86 nm with the standard deviation of the channel-spacing about 0.34 nm. The channel crosstalk is about −30 dB, and the minimal drop loss is about 2 dB.     

球谐域混叠消除最优波束形成方法EI北大核心CSCD

为解决现有的球谐域混叠消除波束形成方法设计目标单一、难以很好地兼容多变的应用场景的问题,提出了球谐域混叠消除最优波束形成方法,并建立了其二阶锥规划形式的多重约束凸优化数学模型。得益于该数学模型,提出了旁瓣约束的混叠消除最大指向性波束形成器、鲁棒的混叠消除最大指向性波束形成器、混叠消除最小方差无失真响应波束形成器、零点约束的混叠消除最大指向性波束形成器。提出方法继承了现有球谐域混叠消除波束形成方法的混叠消除功能,且能够在指向性指数、白噪声增益、旁瓣水平等多个冲突的性能指标之间寻求适宜折中,便于用户根据实际应用需求灵活地调整约束参数得到特定场景下综合性能最优的波束形成器。     

采用空间谱加权稀疏约束的稳健Capon波束形成方法

针对标准Capon波束形成器旁瓣级高以及期望信号方向存在误差时,性能会严重下降的问题,提出一种基于噪声及干扰空间谱加权的稀疏约束Capon波束形成方法。该方法利用波束响应本身具有的稀疏特性,以及在稀疏重构算法中l₁范数具有抑制较大值保护较小值的特性,使用噪声及干扰的空间谱对不同角度的波束响应进行加权,然后施以稀疏约束。仿真、水池试验与湖上试验中,与其它几种方法比较表明该方法可以降低波束形成器的旁瓣级,获得较深的零陷,提高了阵列输出信干噪比与抗导向向量误差的能力。      

Optimal array pattern synthesis for broadband arrays

Broadband beamformers with constant mainlobe response over the frequency of interest are desirable in many applications including underwater acoustics, ultrasonics, acoustic imaging and communications, and so on. Solutions to this problem have been presented for specific array geometry often requiring a larger number of sensors. And the array pattern synthesis error minimization is employed for the whole field of view, which leads to suboptimal designs. In this paper, a broadband array pattern synthesis approach to designing time-domain constant mainlobe response beamformer is proposed. By imposing constraints both on the mainlobe spatial response variation over frequency and on the sidelobes of the beamformer, several optimization criteria are presented and the corresponding convex second-order cone programming implementations are given. In this approach, no preliminary desired beampattern is required and the beam responses variation minimization is employed only in the mainlobe region and not in the sidelobe regions, which improves the beamformer mainlobe synthesis accuracy. Equally, one can obtain lower sidelobes at the same mainlobe synthesis accuracy. This approach is applicable to arrays with arbitrary geometry. Simulation and experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. Performance comparisons of the proposed beamformers and the existing beamformer are also provided.     

Optical phase-based beamformer using MZM SSB modulation combined with crystal polarization optics and a spatial light modulator

The performance of a widely tunable phase-based beamformer for phased array antennas using a new technique to cross-polarized the carrier and the sideband, in order to allow the phase control by means of a spatial light modulator, is experimentally demonstrated. The technique relies on the combination of single sideband amplitude modulation (SSB) using a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and birefringence (to cross-polarized the carrier and the sideband). The architecture has the potential of controlling multiple independent beams simultaneously. The beamformer feeds an eight elements array showing an insertion loss and a reset speed of around 12 dB and 70 ms, respectively. Far-field antenna patterns between 7.5 GHz and 8.5 GHz for nine elevation angles within a range of ±20° have been measured showing beam steering capability, amplitude distribution weighting as well as multibeam operation.     

一种加权稀疏约束稳健Capon波束形成方法

为了克服标准Capon波束形成器旁瓣级高以及存在角度失配时性能急剧下降等缺点, 在稀疏约束Capon波束形成器的基础上, 提出了一种加权稀疏约束Capon波束形成器. 该方法利用波束响应的稀疏分布特性, 在标准Capon波束形成优化模型中加入旁瓣区域波束响应稀疏约束(l₁ 范数约束), 使旁瓣区域波束响应向量中非零元素的个数最小化; 通过阵列采样数据协方差矩阵特征分解得到信号子空间及噪声子空间, 利用信号子空间与噪声子空间的正交特性, 构造加权矩阵对稀疏约束进行加权, 使得稀疏重构时波束响应向量中不同角度对应的元素得到不同程度的约束. 该方法有效地抑制了Capon波束形成器的高旁瓣级, 加深了干扰方位零陷, 提高了阵列输出信干噪比. 由于稀疏约束, 波束响应向主瓣集中, 期望信号方向附近的波束响应都较大, 从而也提高了阵列抗导向矢量角度失配的能力. 数值仿真和水池实验验证了所提方法的有效性.