Efficient Data Acquisition and Reconstruction in Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

Ultrasound is a prominent imaging technique used in a variety of applications. Due to very high frame rate, the amount of raw data obtained while using an ultrasonic device is large. Thus, data management and storage are posing significant problems. To address these issues, we proposed and implemented a few efficient data acquisition, reconstruction, filtering, and noise removal techniques. These methods reduce the amount of raw data collection via hardware devices, followed by missing data reconstruction in the software using a variety of digital signal processing techniques such as Spline interpolation, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT), Discrete Sine Transform (DST) and Inverse Discrete Sine Transform (IDST) etc., This reconstructed data is sent for Frequency Domain (FD) beamforming (a recently proposed beamforming technique) and post-processing to generate output images. For comparison, all outputs were generated using full data and Delay-and-Sum (DAS) beamforming (traditional beamforming technique in ultrasound). From which, it was clear that we can reduce the data storage cost by 33.3% and 50%, by increasing the software’s operation time by a few seconds (i.e. less than one minute).

Keywords

• Ultrasound
• spline interpolation
• acoustical radiation force impulse (ARFI) imaging
• delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming
• frequency domain (FD) beamforming
• spline interpolation