A Computationally Efficient Mean Sound Speed Estimation Method Based on an Evaluation of Focusing Quality for Medical Ultrasound Imaging

Generally, ultrasound receive beamformers calculate the focusing time delays of fixed sound speeds in human tissue (e.g., 1540 m/s). However, phase distortions occur due to variations of sound speeds in soft tissues, resulting in degradation of image quality. Thus, an optimal estimation of sound spe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Electronics (Basel) 2019-11, Vol.8 (11), p.1368
Main Authors: Lee, Jaejin, Yoo, Yangmo, Yoon, Changhan, Song, Tai-kyong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beamforming
Evaluation
Experiments
Field programmable gate arrays
Hardware
Human tissues
Image degradation
Image quality
In vivo methods and tests
Medical research
Methods
Noise
Phase distortion
Radio frequency
Soft tissues
Sound
Spatial resolution
Ultrasonic imaging
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Summary:Generally, ultrasound receive beamformers calculate the focusing time delays of fixed sound speeds in human tissue (e.g., 1540 m/s). However, phase distortions occur due to variations of sound speeds in soft tissues, resulting in degradation of image quality. Thus, an optimal estimation of sound speed is required in order to improve image quality. Implementation of real-time sound speed estimation is challenging due to high computational and hardware complexities. In this paper, an optimal sound speed estimation method with a low-cost hardware resource is presented. In the proposed method, the optimal mean sound speed is determined by measuring the amplitude variance of pre-beamformed radio-frequency (RF) data. The proposed method was evaluated with phantom and in vivo experiments, and implemented on Virtex-4 with Xilinx ISE 12.4 using VHDL. Experiment results indicate that the proposed method could estimate the mean optimal sound speed and enhance spatial resolution with a negligible increase in the hardware resource usage.
ISSN:2079-9292
2079-9292
DOI:10.3390/electronics8111368