Design and Development of Tissue Aware Beamformer Architecture for Ultrasound Imaging Applications
摘要
Ultrasound imaging systems generally use delay and sum (DAS) beamforming scheme for generating the Brightness-mode (B-mode) image from the RF-echoes reflected back from the tissues. However, the images produced from DAS has poor contrast and low resolution. For mitigating the disadvantages offered by DAS, the Delay Multiply and Sum (DMAS) beamforming scheme was introduced. It generates images having superior contrast and improvised resolution. In case of DMAS, information generated from the second harmonics has to be preserved in order to generate the final image. Therefore, the ultrasound imaging system’s sampling frequency must accommodate second order echoes which may not be possible in all the cases. Apart from this, the hardware requirement is comparatively more for DMAS scheme because of its computation complexity. However, if US systems could give the flexibility to reconfigure beamforming while taking into account the limitations of DAS and DMAS beamforming schemes, it would be feasible to pick the best beamforming based on system constraints and clinical requirements. A novel algorithm for such tissue aware beamformer is introduced and along with this the architecture for the same is proposed in this paper.