Tai-Kyong Song

A single FPGA-based portable ultrasound imaging system for point-of-care applications

We present a cost-effective portable ultrasound system based on a single field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for point-of-care applications. In the portable ultrasound system developed, all the ultrasound signal and image processing modules, including an effective 32-channel receive beamformer with pseudo-dynamic focusing, are embedded in an FPGA chip. For overall system control, a mobile processor running Linux at 667 MHz is used. The scan-converted ultrasound image data from the FPGA are directly transferred to the system controller via external direct memory access without a video processing unit. The potable ultrasound system developed can provide real-time B-mode imaging with a maximum frame rate of 30, and it has a battery life of approximately 1.5 h. These results indicate that the single FPGA-based portable ultrasound system developed is able to meet the processing requirements in medical ultrasound imaging while providing improved flexibility for adapting to emerging POC applications.

Coded excitation for ultrasound tissue harmonic imaging

Coded excitation can improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in ultrasound tissue harmonic imaging (THI). However, it could suffer from the increased sidelobe artifact caused by incomplete pulse compression due to the spectral overlap between the fundamental and harmonic components of ultrasound signal after nonlinear propagation in tissues. In this paper, three coded tissue harmonic imaging (CTHI) techniques based on bandpass filtering, power modulation and pulse inversion (i.e., CTHI-BF, CTHI-PM, and CTHI-PI) were evaluated by measuring the peak range sidelobe level (PRSL) with varying frequency bandwidths. From simulation and in vitro studies, the CTHI-PI outperforms the CTHI-BF and CTHI-PM methods in terms of the PRSL, e.g., -43.5dB vs. -24.8dB and -23.0dB, respectively.

Enhancement of photoacoustic image quality by sound speed correction: ex vivo evaluation

Real-time photoacoustic (PA) imaging involves beamforming methods using an assumed fixed sound speed, typically 1540 m/s in soft tissue. This leads to degradation of PA image quality because the true sound speed changes as PA signal propagates through different types of soft tissues: the range from 1450 m/s to 1600 m/s. This paper proposes a new method for estimating an optimal sound speed to enhance the cross-sectional PA image quality. The optimal sound speed is determined when coherent factor with the sound speed is maximized. The proposed method was validated through simulation and ex vivo experiments with microcalcification-contained breast cancer specimen. The experimental results demonstrated that the best lateral resolution of PA images of microcalcifications can be achieved when the optimal sound speed is utilized.

Optimal laser wavelength for photoacoustic imaging of breast microcalcifications

This paper presents photoacoustic imaging (PAI) for real-time detection of micro-scale calcifications (e.g., <1 mm) in the breast, which are an indicator of the cancer occurrence. Optimal wavelength of incident laser for the microcalcification imaging was ascertained through ex vivo experiments with seven breast specimens of volunteers. In the ex vivo experiments, the maximum amplitude of photoacoustic signals from the microcalcifications occurred when the laser wavelength ranged from 690 to 700 nm. This result demonstrated that PAI can serve as a real-time imaging and guidance tool for diagnosis and biopsy of the breast microcalcifications.

Ultrasound second harmonic imaging with a weighted chirp signal

In this paper, a new harmonic imaging technique is proposed and evaluated experimentally. In the proposed method, a weighted chirp signal with a Hanning window is transmitted. The RF samples obtained on each array element are individually compressed by correlating with the reference signal defined as the 2nd harmonic component ( 2f/sub 0/) of a transmitted chirp signal generated in a square-law system. The proposed method uses the compressed 2f/sub 0/ component to form an image, for which the crosscorrelation term should be suppressed below at least -50 dB. Another advantage of the proposed method is that the SNR of 2nd harmonic imaging can be improved without limitation by increasing the duration of the chirp signal.

Photoacoustic imaging of breast microcalcifications: A validation study with 3-dimensional ex vivo data and spectrophotometric measurement

Breast microcalcification has been served as an important early-indicator of breast cancer. In the conventional screening procedure for the breast cancer, X-ray mammography is first conducted and the malignancy of the suspicious patient is confirmed by conducting needle biopsy with real-time imaging-assisted guidance, i.e., stereotactic and US imaging. However, these biopsy guidance methods suffer from large amount of radiative exposure and limited sensitivity on microcalcifications without a mass, respectively. In this paper, we verify the capability of photoacoustic imaging (PAI) for detection of the breast microcalcifications by comparing their locations in a 3-D PA image with those in the corresponding X-ray mammography. For this, cross-sectional PA/US images of breast ex vivo specimens were sequentially acquired with 7.2-MHz linear array transducer and the procedure was repeated by moving the transducer along the elevation direction at an increment of 0.3 mm. A Surelite Nd:YAG OPO system (Continuum Inc., USA) was used for the laser excitation at the rate of 10 Hz with a bifurcated optical fiber bundle for laser delivery. PA signals generated in the specimen were captured with SonixTouch research package (Ultrasonix Corp., Canada). With a volume-rendered PA/US image, it is shown that the locations of the microcalcifications in the X-ray mammography meshed well with those in PA images. From the experimental results, therefore, it is demonstrates that PAI can be an effective alternative for noninvasive, real-time biopsy guidance for breast cancer screening.

In vitro estimation of mean sound speed based on minimum average phase variance in medical ultrasound imaging

Effective receive beamforming in medical ultrasound imaging is important for enhancing spatial and contrast resolution. In current ultrasound receive beamforming, a constant sound speed (e.g., 1540m/s) is assumed. However, the variations of sound speed in soft tissues could introduce phase distortions, leading to degradation in spatial and contrast resolution. This degradation becomes even more severe in imaging fatty tissues (e.g., breast) and with obese patients. In this paper, a mean sound speed estimation method where phase variance of radio-frequency channel data in the region of interest is evaluated is presented for improving spatial and contrast resolution. The proposed estimation method was validated by the Field II simulation and the tissue mimicking phantom experiments. In the simulation, the sound speed of the medium was set to 1450m/s and the proposed method was capable of capturing this value correctly. From the phantom experiments, the -18-dB lateral resolution of the point target at 50mm obtained with the estimated mean sound speed was improved by a factor of 1.3, i.e., from 3.9mm to 2.9mm. The proposed estimation method also provides an improvement of 0.4 in the contrast-to-noise ratio, i.e., from 2.4 to 2.8. These results indicate that the proposed mean sound speed estimation method could enhance the spatial and contrast resolution in the medical ultrasound imaging systems.

Coded tissue harmonic imaging with nonlinear chirp signals

Coded tissue harmonic imaging with pulse inversion (CTHI-PI) based on a linear chirp signal can improve the signal-to-noise ratio with minimizing the peak range sidelobe level (PRSL), which is the main advantage over CTHI with bandpass filtering (CTHI-BF). However, the CTHI-PI technique could suffer from motion artifacts due to decreasing frame rate caused by two firings of opposite phase signals for each scanline. In this paper, a new CTHI method based on a nonlinear chirp signal (CTHI-NC) is presented, which can improve the separation of fundamental and harmonic components without sacrificing frame rate. The nonlinear chirp signal is designed to minimize the PRSL value by optimizing its frequency sweep rate and time duration. The performance of the CTHI-NC method was evaluated by measuring the PRSL and mainlobe width after compression. From the in vitro experiments, the CTHI-NC provided the PRSL of -40.6 dB and the mainlobe width of 2.1 μs for the transmit quadratic nonlinear chirp signal with the center frequency of 2.1 MHz, the fractional bandwidth at -6 dB of 0.6 and the time duration of 15 μs. These results indicate that the proposed method could be used for improving frame rates in CTHI while providing comparable image quality to CTHI-PI.

An efficient pulse compression method of chirp-coded excitation in medical ultrasound imaging

Coded excitation can improve the SNR in medical ultrasound imaging. In coded excitation, pulse compression is applied to compress the elongated coded signals into a short pulse, which typically requires high computational complexity, i.e., a compression filter with a few hundred coefficients. In this paper, we propose an efficient pulse compression method of chirp-coded excitation, in which the pulse compression is conducted with complex baseband data after downsampling, to lower the computational complexity. In the proposed method, although compression is conducted with the complex data, the L-fold downsampling is applied for reducing both data rates and the number of compression filter coefficients; thus, total computational complexity is reduced to the order of 1/L2. The proposed method was evaluated with simulation and phantom experiments. From the simulation and experiment results, the proposed pulse compression method produced similar axial resolution compared with the conventional pulse compression method with negligible errors, i.e., >36 dB in signal-to-error ratio (SER). These results indicate that the proposed method can maintain the performance of pulse compression of chirp-coded excitation while substantially reducing computational complexity.

An Efficient Motion Estimation and Compensation Method for Ultrasound Synthetic Aperture Imaging

This paper describes a method for overcoming motion artifacts in synthetic aperture imaging. The method is based on a computer simulation study on the influence of target motion on synthetic aperture techniques. A region-based motion compensation approach is used in which only the axial motion is estimated and compensated for a given region of interest under the assumption that the whole ROI moves uniformly. The estimated axial motion is calculated with a crosscorrelation method at the point where the focused signal has the maximum energy within the ROI. We also present a method for estimating axial motion using the autocorrelation method that is widely used to estimate average Doppler frequency. Both computer simulations and in vivo experiments show that the proposed crosscorrelation-based method can greatly improve the spatial resolution and SNR of ultrasound imaging by implementing SA techniques for two-way dynamic focusing without motion artifacts. In addition, the autocorrelation-based motion compensation method provides almost the same results as the crosscorrelation-based method, but with a dramatically reduced computational complexity.