Ultrasound phase rotation beamforming on multi-core DSP

Phase rotation beamforming (PRBF) is a commonly-used digital receive beamforming technique. However, due to its high computational requirement, it has traditionally been supported by hardwired architectures, e.g., application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or more recently field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In this study, we investigated the feasibility of supporting software-based PRBF on a multi-core DSP. To alleviate the high computing requirement, the analog front-end (AFE) chips integrating quadrature demodulation in addition to analog-to-digital conversion were defined and used. With these new AFE chips, only delay alignment and phase rotation need to be performed by DSP, substantially reducing the computational load. We implemented the delay alignment and phase rotation modules on a Texas Instruments C6678 DSP with 8 cores. We found it takes 200 μs to beamform 2048 samples from 64 channels using 2 cores. With 4 cores, 20 million samples can be beamformed in one second. Therefore, ADC frequencies up to 40 MHz with 2:1 decimation in AFE chips or up to 20 MHz with no decimation can be supported as long as the ADC-to-DSP I/O requirement can be met. The remaining 4 cores can work on back-end processing tasks and applications, e.g., color Doppler or ultrasound elastography. One DSP being able to handle both beamforming and back-end processing could lead to low-power and low-cost ultrasound machines, benefiting ultrasound imaging in general, particularly portable ultrasound machines.     

超声波电源中数字鉴相器设计

超声波电源系统中电压电流相位差测量精度影响着换能器振幅稳定性以及系统工作效率。目前基于异或门原理,采用分立数字芯片实现鉴相的方案,存在信号调理电路复杂、线性范围小、精度低等问题。为提高电压电流鉴相精度,该文提出了一种数字鉴相器设计。该数字鉴相器采用正交解调原理鉴相,并使用坐标旋转数字算法在FPGA上实现了鉴相器的设计,简化了电路,减少了杂散信号的干扰。经过Modelsim仿真测试表明在30 dB信噪比条件下鉴相误差为0.21°,最后经过实验测试,数字鉴相器鉴相最大误差绝对值为0.256°,提高了测量精度。     

部分阵元参考法校正超声成像相位畸变的仿真研究

本文应用互相关技术在阵元接收射频信号噪比不同情况下，对部分阵元参考法校正超声成像位畸变进行了仿真实验。     

Adaptive filter for unwrapping noisy phase image in phase-stepping interferometry

An adaptive filter for preprocessing wrapped phase image with high noise content has been developed. The window size of this median filter is adjustable according to its location in the noisy phase image. This size-adjustable median filter has not only high noise-rejection ability, but also both good phase-jump identification and image-detail preservation properties. Phase unwrapping can then be done to recover the real phase image without the hampering influence of noise, especially the noise near the phase jumps. Both numerical simulation and experimental results used to examine the effectiveness of this adaptive filter are presented.