Low-complexity motion-compensated beamforming algorithm and architecture for synthetic transmit aperture in ultrasound imaging

被引:4
作者
机构
[1] Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei
来源
| 1600年 / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., United States卷 / 62期
关键词
Beamforming; compensation; low complexity; motion; STA; synthetic aperture; synthetic transmit aperture; ultrasound;
D O I
10.1109/TSP.2013.2295551
中图分类号
学科分类号
摘要
Synthetic transmit aperture (STA) has been widely investigated in ultrasound system recently with characteristics of high frame rate and low hardware cost. Since the high-resolution image (HRI) of STA is formed by summation of low-resolution images (LRIs), it is susceptible to inter-firing motions. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity global motion compensation algorithm. We use the common region of interest ({rm ROI}-{{rm com}}) between different transmissions of STA imaging to beamform backward and forward beam vectors. Then, the magnitude and direction of motion can be evaluated by cross-correlations between specific beam vectors in STA imaging. Compared with the uncompensated image in two-dimentional (2D) motion environment, the proposed motion compensation algorithm can improve the contrast ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) by 13.73 and 2.04 dB, respectively. Also, the proposed algorithm improves the CR and CNR about 7.84 and 1.36 dB comparing with the reference work, respectively. In the Field II breath model, the proposed method also improves the CR and CNR about 6.65 and 1.04 dB than the reference method, respectively. Moreover, we propose a low-complexity delay generator in the architecture design to further reduce the computational complexity of the whole beamforming system. Finally, we verify the proposed low-complexity motion compensation beamforming engine by using the VLSI implementation with CMOS 90 nm technology. In the post-layout result, the core size is 2.39 mm-2 at 125 MHz operating frequency and the frame rate of the beamforming system is 42.23 frames per second. © 1991-2012 IEEE.
引用
收藏
页码:840 / 851
页数:11
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