This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 8675 including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction, and Conference Committee listing.

With ultrasound imaging, the motion and deformation of tissue can be measured. Tissue can be deformed by applying a force on it and the resulting deformation is a function of its mechanical properties. Quantification of this resulting tissue deformation to assess the mechanical properties of tissue is called elastography. If the tissue under interrogation is actively deforming, the deformation is directly related to its function and quantification of this deformation is normally referred as ‘strain imaging’. Elastography can be used for atherosclerotic plaques characterization, while the contractility of the heart or skeletal muscles can be assessed with strain imaging. We developed radio frequency (RF) based ultrasound methods to assess the deformation at higher resolution and with higher accuracy than commercial methods using conventional image data (Tissue Doppler Imaging and 2D speckle tracking methods). However, the improvement in accuracy is mainly achieved when measuring strain along the ultrasound beam direction, so 1D. We further extended this method to multiple directions and further improved precision by using compounding of data acquired at multiple beam steered angles. In arteries, the presence of vulnerable plaques may lead to acute events like stroke and myocardial infarction. Consequently, timely detection of these plaques is of great diagnostic value. Non-invasive ultrasound strain compounding is currently being evaluated as a diagnostic tool to identify the vulnerability of plaques. In the heart, we determined the strain locally and at high resolution resulting in a local assessment in contrary to conventional global functional parameters like cardiac output or shortening fraction.

Elastography has become widely used for minimally invasive diagnosis in many tumors as seen with breast, liver and prostate. Among different modalities, ultrasound-based elastography stands out due to its advantages including being safe, real-time, and relatively low-cost. While lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality among both men and women, the use of ultrasound elastography for lung cancer diagnosis has hardly been investigated due to the limitations of ultrasound in air. In this work, we investigate the use of static-compression based endobronchial ultrasound elastography by a 3D trans-oesophageal echocardiography (TEE) transducer for lung cancer diagnosis. A water-filled balloon was designed to 1) improve the visualization of endobronchial ultrasound and 2) to induce compression via pumping motion inside the trachea and bronchiole. In a phantom study, we have successfully generated strain images indicating the stiffness difference between the gelatin background and agar inclusion. A similar strain ratio was confirmed with Philips ultrasound strain-based elastography product. For ex-vivo porcine lung study, different tissue ablation methods including chemical injection, Radio Frequency (RF) ablation, and direct heating were implemented to achieve tumor-mimicking tissue. Stiff ablated lung tissues were obtained and detected with our proposed method. These results suggest the feasibility of pulmonary elastography to differentiate stiff tumor tissue from normal tissue.

Automated segmentation of 3D echocardiographic images in patients with congenital heart disease is challenging, because the boundary between blood and cardiac tissue is poorly defined in some regions. Cardiologists mentally incorporate movement of the heart, using temporal coherence of structures to resolve ambiguities. Therefore, we investigated the merit of temporal cross-correlation for automated segmentation over the entire cardiac cycle. Optimal settings for maximum cross-correlation (MCC) calculation, based on a 3D cross-correlation based displacement estimation algorithm, were determined to obtain the best contrast between blood and myocardial tissue over the entire cardiac cycle. Resulting envelope-based as well as RF-based MCC values were used as additional external force in a deformable model approach, to segment the left-ventricular cavity in entire systolic phase. MCC values were tested against, and combined with, adaptive filtered, demodulated RF-data. Segmentation results were compared with manually segmented volumes using a 3D Dice Similarity Index (3DSI). Results in 3D pediatric echocardiographic images sequences (n = 4) demonstrate that incorporation of temporal information improves segmentation. The use of MCC values, either alone or in combination with adaptive filtered, demodulated RF-data, resulted in an increase of the 3DSI in 75% of the cases (average 3DSI increase: 0.71 to 0.82). Results might be further improved by optimizing MCC-contrast locally, in regions with low blood-tissue contrast. Reducing underestimation of the endocardial volume due to MCC processing scheme (choice of window size) and consequential border-misalignment, could also lead to more accurate segmentations. Furthermore, increasing the frame rate will also increase MCC-contrast and thus improve segmentation.

State-of-the-art practice for lung-cancer staging bronchoscopy often draws upon a combination of endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) and multidetector computed-tomography (MDCT) imaging. While EBUS offers real-time in vivo imaging of suspicious lesions and lymph nodes, its low signal-to-noise ratio and tendency to exhibit missing region-of-interest (ROI) boundaries complicate diagnostic tasks. Furthermore, past efforts did not incorporate automated analysis of EBUS images and a subsequent fusion of the EBUS and MDCT data. To address these issues, we propose near real-time automated methods for three-dimensional (3D) EBUS segmentation and reconstruction that generate a 3D ROI model along with ROI measurements. Results derived from phantom data and lung-cancer patients show the promise of the methods. In addition, we present a preliminary image-guided intervention (IGI) system example, whereby EBUS imagery is registered to a patient’s MDCT chest scan.

In several studies, intraplaque neovascularization (IPN) has been linked with plaque vulnerability. The recent development of contrast enhanced ultrasound enables IPN detection, but an accurate quantification of IPN is a big challenge due to noise, motion, subtle contrast response, blooming of contrast and artifacts. We present an algorithm that automatically estimates the location and amount of contrast within the plaque over time. Plaque pixels are initially labeled through an iterative expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The used algorithm avoids several drawbacks of standard EM. It is capable of selecting the best number of components in an unsupervised way, based on a minimum message length criterion. Next, neighborhood information using a 5×5 kernel and spatiotemporal behavior are combined with the known characteristics of contrast spots in order to group components, identify artifacts and finalize the classification. Image sequences are divided into 3-seconds subgroups. A pixel is relabeled as an artifact if it is labeled as contrast for more than 1.5 seconds in at least two subgroups. For 10 plaques, automated segmentation results were validated with manual segmentation of contrast in 10 frames per clip. Average Dice index and area ratio were 0.73±0.1 (mean±SD) and 98.5±29.6 (%) respectively. Next, 45 atherosclerotic plaques were analyzed. Time integrated IPN surface area was calculated. Average area of IPN was 3.73±3.51 mm2. Average area of 45 plaques was 11.6±8.6 mm2. This method based on EM contrast segmentation provides a new way of IPN quantification.

Cardiac myofiber plays an important role in stress mechanism during heart beating periods. The orientation of myofibers decides the effects of the stress distribution and the whole heart deformation. It is important to image and quantitatively extract these orientations for understanding the cardiac physiological and pathological mechanism and for diagnosis of chronic diseases. Ultrasound has been wildly used in cardiac diagnosis because of its ability of performing dynamic and noninvasive imaging and because of its low cost. An extraction method is proposed to automatically detect the cardiac myofiber orientations from high frequency ultrasound images. First, heart walls containing myofibers are imaged by B-mode high frequency (<20 MHz) ultrasound imaging. Second, myofiber orientations are extracted from ultrasound images using the proposed method that combines a nonlinear anisotropic diffusion filter, Canny edge detector, Hough transform, and K-means clustering. This method is validated by the results of ultrasound data from phantoms and pig hearts.

In real-time 3-D ultrasound imaging using 2-D array transducers, a large number of the 2-D array elements pose challenges in fabricating and transferring signals from/into the system. This fabrication problem has been solved by using a silicon micromachining process for capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) arrays. For realtime 3-D ultrasound imaging, manipulating massive ultrasound data acquired from a large number of system channels is a challenge as is fabricating and interconnecting hundreds or thousands of elements of 2-D array with the imaging system’s front-end (FE) electronics. Minimizing the number of transmitting and receiving elements and the firing events without degrading the image quality is one of the solutions to reduce the overall system complexity and improve the frame rate. We have been developing a real-time 3-D volumetric ultrasound imaging system using 2-D CMUT arrays by integrating FE electronics with a large number of 2-D array elements. Here, we explore a configuration method to design a scalable 2-D CMUT array and a new volumetric image-formation method to provide higher information rate of a volume image. In this paper, we present the 2-D CMUT-on-ASIC arrays designed to reduce the overall system complexity, and a new volume scanning and image-forming method for real-time 3-D volumetric ultrasonic imaging using 2-D CMUT-on-ASIC arrays. To evaluate our works, we performed from theoretical studies for point spread functions of the array configuration to phantom experiments with off-the-line images.

Designing a mechanically flexible catheter based volumetric ultrasonic imaging device for intravascular and intracardiac imaging is challenging due to small transducer area and limited number of cables. With a few parallel channels, synthetic phased array processing is necessary to acquire data from a large number of transducer elements. This increases the data collection time and hence reduces frame rate and causes artifacts due to tissue-transducer motion. Some of these drawbacks can be resolved by different array designs offered by CMUT-on-CMOS approach. We recently implemented a 2.1-mm diameter single chip 10 MHz dual ring CMUT-on-CMOS array for forward looking ICE with 64-transmit and 56-receive elements along with associated electronics. These volumetric arrays have the small element size required by high operating frequencies and achieve sub mm resolution, but the system would be susceptible to motion artifacts. To enable real time imaging with high SNR, we designed novel arrays consisting of multiple defocused annular rings for transmit aperture and a single ring receive array. The annular transmit rings are utilized to act as a high power element by focusing to a virtual ring shaped line behind the aperture. In this case, image reconstruction is performed by only receive beamforming, reducing total required firing steps from 896 to 14 with a trade-off in image resolution. The SNR of system is improved more than 5 dB for the same frequency and frame rate as compared to the dual ring array, which can be utilized to achieve the same resolution by increasing the operating frequency.

This paper compares the imaging performance of a 128+128 element row-column addressed array with a fully addressed 16×16 2D array. The comparison is made via simulations of the point spread function with Field II. Both arrays have lambda-pitch, a center frequency of 3:5MHz and use 256 active elements. The row-column addressed array uses 128 transmit channels and 128 receive channels, whereas the fully addressed array uses 256 channels in both transmit and receive. The large size of the emulated row and column elements in the row-column addressed array causes ghost echoes to appear. The ghost echoes are shown to be suppressed when the sub-elements within each of the emulated row and column elements are apodized. The maximum ghost intensity is suppressed by 22:2 dB compared to using no apodization. With apodization applied, the full-width-at-half-maximum in the lateral direction for the fully addressed array is 2:81mm, and 1:01mm for the row-column addressed array. This shows that the detail resolution can be more than doubled using the row-column addressed array instead of the fully addressed array. The row column addressed array achieves a R_{20 dB} cystic resolution of 0:76mm, compared to 3:16mm for the fully addressed array. The significantly smaller R_{20 dB}-value for the row-column addressed array indicates that it can achieve a much higher contrast resolution than the fully addressed array.

Up-to-date capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) technologies provide us unique opportunities to minimize the size and cost of ultrasound scanners by integrating front-end circuits into CMUT arrays. We describe a design prototype of a portable ultrasound scan-head probe using 2-D phased CMUT-on-ASIC arrays of 3-MHz 250 micrometer-pitch by fabricating and integrating front-end electronics with 2-D CMUT array elements. One of the objectives of our work is to design a receive beamformer architecture for the smart probe with compact size and comparable performance. In this work, a phase-rotation based receive beamformer using the sampling frequency of 4 times the center frequency and a hybrid beamforming to reduce the channel counts of the system-side are introduced. Parallel beamforming is considered for the purpose of saving power consumption of battery (by firing fewer times per image frame). This architecture has the advantage of directly obtaining I and Q components. By using the architecture, the interleaved I/Q data from the storage is acquired and I/Q demodulation for baseband processing is directly achieved without demodulators including sin and cosine lookup tables and mixers. Currently, we are extending the presented architecture to develop a true smart probe by including lower power devices and cooling systems, and bringing wireless data transmission into consideration.

In this study, we showed the new transducer and probe integration of 2D ultrasound probe using cMUT. cMUT ultrasound probe having 8192 elements is assembled with tiling frame. Flip chip bonded cMUT-ASIC tiles were arrayed along 2×8 directions to enlarge lateral aperture. Tiling gap between two tiles was under 100μm. RTV layer that has 1mm thick is used in 2-D probe system as a lens and protection layer. Thermal module is also analyzed by using the thermal network analysis, which is realized with the air fans and the fins. Designed PCB circuit for tiling module which is considered with cooling spread concept is 5cm × 5cm dimension. Uniformity and performance of tiled ultrasound transducer were tested under soybean oil at 3MHz frequency successfully. The measured 256 elements distribution has only 4.45% deviation. If we can remove the side edge error, the deviation will be under 3%. The performance after RTV lensing showed 35% attenuation in Tx and 35~45% attenuation in Rx.

Vector velocity imaging using the Transverse Oscillation (TO) approach has recently been FDA approved for linear array transducers on a commercial platform. It can now be used clinically for studying the complex ow at e.g. bifurcations, valves, and the heart in real time. Several clinical examples from venous ow to rotational ow in the heart will be shown. The technique is also being further developed and adapted for convex and phased array probes, for spectral velocity estimation, pressure estimation, and for three dimensional velocity tensor imaging. It is shown how the methods are optimized using Field II simulations along with several examples of their performance.

A non-invasive method for estimating 2-D pressure gradients from ultrasound vector velocity data is presented. The method relies on in-plane vector velocity elds acquired using the Transverse Oscillation method. The pressure gradients are estimated by applying the Navier-Stokes equations for isotropic uids to the estimated velocity elds. The velocity elds were measured for a steady ow on a carotid bifurcation phantom (Shelley Medical, Canada) with a 70% constriction on the internal branch. Scanning was performed with a BK8670 linear transducer (BK Medical, Denmark) connected to a BK Medical 2202 UltraView Pro Focus scanner. The results are validated through nite element simulations of the carotid ow model where the geometry is determined from MR images. This proof of concept study was conducted at nine ultrasound frames per second. Estimated pressure gradients along the longitudinal direction of the constriction varied from 0 kPa/m to 10 kPa/m with a normalized bias of -9.1% for the axial component and -7.9% for the lateral component. The relative standard deviation of the estimator, given in reference to the peak gradient, was 28.4% in the axial direction and 64.5% in the lateral direction. A study made across the constriction was also conducted. This yielded magnitudes from 0 kPa/m to 7 kPa/m with a normalized bias of -5.7% and 13.9% for the axial and lateral component, respectively. The relative standard deviations of this study were 45.2% and 83.2% in the axial and lateral direction, respectively.

This paper presents 3D vector flow images obtained using the 3D Transverse Oscillation (TO) method. The method employs a 2D transducer and estimates the three velocity components simultaneously, which is important for visualizing complex flow patterns. Data are acquired using the experimental ultrasound scanner SARUS on a flow-rig system with steady flow. The vessel of the flow-rig is centered at a depth of 30 mm, and the flow has an expected 2D circular-symmetric parabolic profile with a peak velocity of 1 m/s. Ten frames of 3D vector flow images are acquired in a cross-sectional plane orthogonal to the center axis of the vessel, which coincides with the y-axis and the flow direction. Hence, only out-of-plane motion is expected. This motion cannot be measured by typical commercial scanners employing 1D arrays. Each frame consists of 16 flow lines steered from -15 to 15 degrees in steps of 2 degrees in the ZX-plane. For the center line, 3200 M-mode lines are acquired yielding 100 velocity profiles. At the center of the vessel, the mean and standard deviation of the estimated velocity vectors are (v_x, v_y, v_z) = (-0.026, 95, 1.0)±(8.8, 6.2, 0.84) cm/s compared to the expected (0.0, 96, 0.0) cm/s. Relative to the velocity magnitude this yields standard deviations of (9.1, 6.4, 0.88) %, respectively. Volumetric flow rates were estimated for all ten frames yielding 57.9±2.0 mL/s in comparison with 56.2 mL/s measured by a commercial magnetic flow meter. One frame of the obtained 3D vector flow data is presented and visualized using three alternative approaches. Practically no in-plane motion (v_x and v_z) is measured, whereas the out-of-plane motion (v_y) and the velocity magnitude exhibit the expected 2D circular-symmetric parabolic shape. It shown that the ultrasound method is suitable for real-time data acquisition as opposed to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The results demonstrate that the 3D TO method is capable of performing 3D vector flow imaging.

Synthetic aperture (SA) ultrasound imaging provides accurate axial and lateral displacement estimates, however, the low transmit acoustic power of SA limits its clinical use. In this paper, we investigated the feasibility of using multi-element sub-aperture to improve acoustic power of SA imaging for carotid artery elastography. We used Field II to synthesize RF images with varying size sub-apertures, at different opening angles. Axial and lateral displacements were estimated by applying the 2D cross-correlation tracking algorithm to the synthesized RF images. Performance was assessed by computing root mean square error (RMSE) between the theoretical and estimated elastograms. A noticeable increase in power was observed for a configuration involving 3 -11 elements in the sub-aperture and an opening angle between 60°– 120°, respectively. More specifically, RMSE of axial and lateral displacements was less than 0.4% and 2%, respectively, and whereas in the case of radial and circumferential strain was less than 2% and 7%, respectively. These findings were encouraging enough to warrant further studies.

The wall-filter selection curve (WFSC) method was developed to automatically select cut-off velocities for high-frequency power Doppler imaging. Selection curves are constructed by plotting color pixel density (CPD) as a function of wall filter cut-off velocity. A new three-component mathematical model is developed to guide the design of an online implementation of the method for in vivo imaging. The model treats Doppler imaging as a signal detection task in which the scanner must distinguish intravascular pixels from perivascular and extravascular pixels and includes a cost function to identify the optimum cut-off velocity that provides accurate vascular quantification and minimizes the effect of color pixel artifacts on visualization of vascular structures. The goodness of fit of the three-component model to flow-phantom data is significantly improved compared to a previous two-component model (F test, p < 0:005). Simulations using the new model indicate that selection curves should be sampled using at least 100 cut-off velocities to ensure robust performance of the automated WFSC method and determine an upper bound on CPD variability that ensures reliable vascular quantification accuracy, defined as CPD within 5% of the reference vascular volume fraction. Results of the simulations also provide evidence that limiting the selection of the cut-off velocity to a binary choice between the middle and right end of the characteristic interval is sufficient to meet the quantification accuracy goal. The model provides an intuitive, empirical description of the relationship between system settings and blood-flow detection performance in power Doppler imaging.

For women with dense breast tissue, who are at much higher risk for developing breast cancer, the performance of mammography is at its worst. Consequently, many early cancers go undetected when they are the most treatable. Improved cancer detection for women with dense breasts would decrease the proportion of breast cancers diagnosed at later stages, which would significantly lower the mortality rate. The emergence of whole breast ultrasound provides good performance for women with dense breast tissue, and may eliminate the current trade-off between the cost effectiveness of mammography and the imaging performance of more expensive systems such as magnetic resonance imaging. We report on the performance of SoftVue, a whole breast ultrasound imaging system, based on the principles of ultrasound tomography. SoftVue was developed by Delphinus Medical Technologies and builds on an early prototype developed at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. We present results from preliminary testing of the SoftVue system, performed both in the lab and in the clinic. These tests aimed to validate the expected improvements in image performance. Initial qualitative analyses showed major improvements in image quality, thereby validating the new imaging system design. Specifically, SoftVue’s imaging performance was consistent across all breast density categories and had much better resolution and contrast. The implications of these results for clinical breast imaging are discussed and future work is described.

Ultrasound Computer Tomography is an upcoming imaging modality for early breast cancer detection. For evaluation of the method, comparison with the standard method X-ray mammography is of strongest interest. To overcome the significant differences in dimensionality and compression state of the breast, in earlier work a registration method based on biomechanical modeling of the breast was proposed. However only homogeneous models could be applied, i.e. inner structures of the breast were neglected. In this work we extend the biomechanical modeling of the breast by estimating patient-specific tissue parameters automatically from the speed of sound volume. Two heterogeneous models are proposed modeling a quadratic and an exponential relationship between speed of sound and tissue stiffness. The models were evaluated using phantom images and clinical data. The size of all lesions is better preserved using heterogeneous models, especially using an exponential relationship. The presented approach yields promising results and gives a physical justification to our registration method. It can be considered as a first step towards a realistic modeling of the breast.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to characterize human breast cancer tissues by the measurement of microacoustic properties. Methods: We investigated eight breast cancer patients using acoustic microscopy. For each patient, seven blocks of tumor tissue were collected from seven different positions around a tumor mass. Frozen sections (10 micrometer, μm) of human breast cancer tissues without staining and fixation were examined in a scanning acoustic microscope with focused transducers at 80 and 200 MHz. Hematoxylin and Eosin (H and E) stained sections from the same frozen breast cancer tissues were imaged by optical microscopy for comparison. Results: The results of acoustic imaging showed that acoustic attenuation and sound speed in cancer cell-rich tissue regions were significantly decreased compared with the surrounding tissue regions, where most components are normal cells/tissues, such as fibroblasts, connective tissue and lymphocytes. Our observation also showed that the ultrasonic properties were influenced by arrangements of cells and tissue patterns. Conclusions: Our data demonstrate that attenuation and sound speed imaging can provide biomechanical information of the tumor and normal tissues. The results also demonstrate the potential of acoustic microscopy as an auxiliary method for operative detection and localization of cancer affected regions.

3D ultrasound computer tomography (USCT) requires a large number of transducers approx. two orders of magnitude larger than in a 2D system. Technical feasibility limits the number of transducer positions to a much smaller number resulting in a sparse aperture and causing artifacts due to grating lobe effects in the images. Usually, grating lobes are suppressed by using a non-sparse geometry. Thus, there is no quantitative estimation method available how much the image contrast is degraded when a sparse aperture is applied and how much the contrast is improved when adding more transducers, changing the overall aperture or the object. In this paper the effect of the grating lobes on the image quality was analyzed for a spherical, a hemispherical and the semi-ellipsoidal USCT aperture: The background noise due to grating lobes is very similar for the three apertures and mainly influenced by the sparseness and the imaged object. A model for noise reduction was fitted to simulated and experimental data, and can be used to predict the peak-signal-to-noise- ratio for a given object and number of aperture positions.

3D ultrasound computer tomography (3D USCT) promises reproducible high-resolution images for early detection of breast tumors. The synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) used for image reconstruction is highly computeintensive but suitable for an accelerated execution on GPUs. In this paper we investigate how a previous implementation of the SAFT algorithm in CUDA C can be further accelerated and integrated into the existing MATLAB signal and image processing chain for 3D USCT. The focus is on an efficient preprocessing and preparation of data blocks in MATLAB as well as an improved utilisation of special hardware like the texture fetching units on GPUs. For 64 slices with 1024×1024 pixels each the overall runtime of the reconstruction including data loading and preprocessing could be decreased from 35 hours with CPU to 2.4 hours with eight GPUs.

A new adaptive beamforming method for accurately focusing ultrasound behind highly scattering layers of human skull and its application to 3D transcranial imaging via small-aperture planar phased arrays are reported. Due to its undulating, inhomogeneous, porous, and highly attenuative structure, human skull bone severely distorts ultrasonic beams produced by conventional focusing methods in both imaging and therapeutic applications. Strong acoustical mismatch between the skull and brain tissues, in addition to the skull's undulating topology across the active area of a planar ultrasonic probe, could cause multiple reflections and unpredictable refraction during beamforming and imaging processes. Such effects could significantly deflect the probe's beam from the intended focal point. Presented here is a theoretical basis and simulation results of an adaptive beamforming method that compensates for the latter effects in transmission mode, accompanied by experimental verification. The probe is a custom-designed 2 MHz, 256-element matrix array with 0.45 mm element size and 0.1mm kerf. Through its small footprint, it is possible to accurately measure the profile of the skull segment in contact with the probe and feed the results into our ray tracing program. The latter calculates the new time delay patterns adapted to the geometrical and acoustical properties of the skull phantom segment in contact with the probe. The time delay patterns correct for the refraction at the skull-brain boundary and bring the distorted beam back to its intended focus. The algorithms were implemented on the ultrasound open-platform ULA-OP (developed at the University of Florence).

CMUT-on-ASIC integration techniques are promising for the development of lower cost smaller volume scanners with higher performance in terms of features and image qualities because it minimizes parasitic capacitances and ultimately improves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Moreover, a frequency bandwidth of CMUT array is known as relatively broader than that of other ultrasonic transducer arrays. To utilize the wide bandwidth characteristic of the CMUT arrays, in this paper, we introduce a FDMA (frequency division multiple access) based ultrasound imaging technique using orthogonally band-divided coded signals to provide dynamic transmit focused imaging without sacrificing the frame rate. In the presented method, the orthogonal sub-band coded signals are simultaneously fired on multiple ranges, in which each signal is focused at a different range, in one transmission event. This paper also presents an ultrasound imageformation method and a modulation and demodulation process of orthogonal sub-band coded signals designed within the frequency bandwidth of the CMUT arrays. The presented method is verified by computer simulations using Field II and experiments. The simulation results using a computer generated tissue mimicking phantom show that the presented method can be achieved with both increased image quality and frame rate. The experimental results to verify the feasibility of the presented method using orthogonal sub-band coded signals show that the reflected signals from targets are successfully separated into two compressed signals. Currently, we are extending the presented approach to ultrasound imaging technique for volumetric ultrasound scanners using 2-D CMUT-on-ASIC arrays.

This paper presents a new design of a discrete time Delta-Sigma (ΔΣ) oversampled ultrasound beamformer which integrates individual channel apodization by means of variable feedback voltage in the Delta-Sigma analog to digital (A/D) converters. The output bit-width of each oversampled A/D converter remains the same as in an unmodified one. The outputs of all receiving channels are delayed and summed, and the resulting multi-bit sample stream is filtered and decimated to become an image line. The simplicity of this beamformer allows the production of high-channel-count or very compact beamformers suitable for 2-D arrays or compact portable scanners. The new design is evaluated using measured data from the research scanner SARUS and a BK-8811 192 element linear array transducer (BK Medical, Herlev, Denmark), insonifying a water-filled wire phantom containing four wires orthogonal to the image plane. The data are acquired using 12-bit flash A/D converters at a sampling rate of 70 MHz, and are then upsampled off-line to 560 MHz for input to the simulated ΔΣ beamformer. The latter generates a B-mode image which is compared to that produced by a digital beamformer that uses 10-bit A/D converters. The performance is evaluated by comparing the width of the wire images at half amplitude and the noise level of the images. The ΔΣ beamformer resolution has been found to be identical to that of the multi-bit A/D beamforming architecture, while the noise floor is elevated by approximately 6 dB.

Conventional wisdom in ultrasonic array design drives development towards larger arrays because of the inverse relationship between aperture size and resolution. We propose a method using synthetic aperture beamforming to study image quality as a function of aperture size in simulation, in a phantom and in vivo. A single data acquisition can be beamformed to produce matched images with a range of aperture sizes, even in the presence of target motion. In this framework we evaluate the reliability of typical image quality metrics – speckle signal-tonoise ratio, contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio – for use in in vivo studies. Phantom and simulation studies are in good agreement in that there exists a point of diminishing returns in image quality at larger aperture sizes. We demonstrate challenges in applying and interpreting these metrics in vivo, showing results in hypoechoic vasculature regions. We explore the use of speckle brightness to describe image quality in the presence of in vivo clutter and underlying tissue inhomogeneities.

A new scattering model for ultrasound is proposed. The new model accounts for the dominant sources of tissue scattering including reverberation. In addition to the proposed model a parameter estimation scheme for the model is presented. Using the decomposition scheme, the received ultrasound signal can be decomposed into the various scattering sources arriving concurrently. Sources that are within the expected region of the ballistic wave are kept and used to reconstruct a decluttered B-Mode image.

During the last decade, various methods for 2D array design have been developed for real-time 3D ultrasonic imaging. Most of the methods concentrated on how to reduce the number of elements and channels to overcome the difficulties in array fabrication and mass data processing. Few works focused on the 2D array beamforming techniques to narrow the main lobe width and suppress the side and grating lobe levels, thus improve the 3D image quality. Coherence imaging (CI) has been verified to suppress the side and grating lobes of the 2D ultrasound images in an effective way. It was based on a statistical analysis of the received signal dispersion. In this paper, two kinds of CI, coherence factor (CF) and sign coherence factor (SCF) are modified for 2D arrays and combined with array designs to improve the 3D ultrasound image qualities. The simulation results of point spread functions show that the main lobe width is narrowed from 1.26mm to 1.01mm and the side lobe level is suppressed from -48.79dB to -79.31dB for dense arrays with CF. Similar simulation results can be obtained for other array designs. The combination of CI and 2D array design provides a potential approach to increase the 3D imaging resolution and contrast without increasing the system complexity.

Effective brachytherapy procedures require precise placement of radioactive seeds in the prostate. Currently, transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging is one of the main intraoperative imaging modalities to assist physicians in placement of brachytherapy seeds. However, the seed detection rate with TRUS is poor mainly because ultrasound imaging is highly sensitive to variations in seed orientation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the abilities of a new acoustic radiation force imaging modality, vibro-acoustography (VA), equipped with a 1.75D array transducer and implemented on a customized clinical ultrasound scanner, to image and localize brachytherapy seeds in prostatic tissue. To perform experiments, excised cadaver prostate specimens were implanted with dummy brachytherapy seeds, and embedded in tissue mimicking gel to simulate the properties of the surrounding soft tissues. The samples were scanned using the VA system and the resulting VA signals were used to reconstruct VA images at several depths inside the tissue. To further evaluate the performance of VA in detecting seeds, X-ray computed tomography (CT) images of the same tissue sample, were obtained and used as a gold-standard to compare the number of seeds detected by the two methods. Our results indicate that VA is capable of imaging of brachytherapy seeds with accuracy and high contrast, and can detect a large percentage of the seeds implanted within the tissue samples.

Image guided therapy is a natural concept and commonly used in medicine. In anesthesia, a common task is the injection of an anesthetic close to a nerve under freehand ultrasound guidance. Several guidance systems exist using electromagnetic tracking of the ultrasound probe as well as the needle, providing the physician with a precise projection of the needle into the ultrasound image. This, however, requires additional expensive devices. We suggest using optical tracking with miniature cameras attached to a 2D ultrasound probe to achieve a higher acceptance among physicians. The purpose of this paper is to present an intuitive method to calibrate freehand ultrasound needle guidance systems employing a rigid stereo camera system. State of the art methods are based on a complex series of error prone coordinate system transformations which makes them susceptible to error accumulation. By reducing the amount of calibration steps to a single calibration procedure we provide a calibration method that is equivalent, yet not prone to error accumulation. It requires a linear calibration object and is validated on three datasets utilizing di erent calibration objects: a 6mm metal bar and a 1:25mm biopsy needle were used for experiments. Compared to existing calibration methods for freehand ultrasound needle guidance systems, we are able to achieve higher accuracy results while additionally reducing the overall calibration complexity. Ke

Medical ultrasonic grayscale images are formed from acoustic waves following their interactions with distributed scatterers within tissues media. For accurate simulation of acoustic wave propagation, a reliable model describing unknown parameters associated with tissues scatterers such as distribution, size and acoustic properties is essential. In this work, we introduce a novel approach defining ultrasonic scatterers by incorporating a distribution of cellular nuclei patterns in biological tissues to simulate ultrasonic response of atherosclerotic tissues in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS). For this reason, a virtual phantom is generated through manual labeling of different tissue types (fibrotic, lipidic and calcified) on histology sections. Acoustic properties of each tissue type are defined by assuming that the ultrasound signal is primarily backscattered by the nuclei of the organic cells within the intima and media of the vessel wall. This resulting virtual phantom is subsequently used to simulate ultrasonic wave propagation through the tissue medium computed using finite difference estimation. Subsequently B-mode images for a specific histological section are processed from the simulated radiofrequency (RF) data and compared with the original IVUS of the same tissue section. Real IVUS RF signals for these histological sections were obtained using a single-element mechanically rotating 40MHz transducer. Evaluation is performed by trained reviewers subjectively assessing both simulated and real B-mode IVUS images. Our simulation platform provides a high image quality with a very promising correlation to the original IVUS images. This will facilitate to better understand progression of such a chronic disease from micro-level and its integration into cardiovascular disease-specific models.

Endosseous implants are well-established in modern dentistry. However, without appropriate therapeutic intervention, progressive peri-implant bone loss may lead to failing implants. Conventionally, the particularly relevant vestibular jawbone thickness is monitored using radiographic 3D imaging methods. Ionizing radiation, as well as imaging artifacts caused by metallic implants and superstructures are major drawbacks of these imaging modalities. In this study, a high frequency ultrasound (HFUS) based approach to assess the vestibular jawbone thickness is being introduced. It should be emphasized that the presented method does not require ultrasound penetration of the jawbone. An in-vitro study using two porcine specimens with inserted endosseous implants has been carried out to assess the accuracy of our approach. The implant of the first specimen was equipped with a gingiva former while a polymer superstructure was mounted onto the implant of the second specimen. Ultrasound data has been acquired using a 4 degree of freedom (DOF) high frequency (<50MHz) laboratory ultrasound scanner. The ultrasound raw data has been converted to polygon meshes including the surfaces of bone, gingiva, gingiva former (first specimen) and superstructure (second specimen). The meshes are matched with a-priori acquired 3D models of the implant, the superstructure and the gingiva former using a best-fit algorithm. Finally, the vestibular peri-implant bone thickness has been assessed in the resulting 3D models. The accuracy of this approach has been evaluated by comparing the ultrasound based thickness measurement with a reference measurement acquired with an optical extra-oral 3D scanner prior to covering the specimens with gingiva. As a final result, the bone thicknesses of the two specimens were measured yielding an error of −46±89μm (first specimen) and 70±93μm (second specimen).

Nonlinear (subharmonic/harmonic) imaging with ultrasound contrast agents (UCA) could characterize the vasa vasorum, which could help assess the risk associated with atherosclerosis. However, the sensitivity and specificity of high-frequency nonlinear imaging must be improved to enable its clinical translation. The current excitation scheme employs sine-bursts — a strategy that requires high-peak pressures to produce strong nonlinear response from UCA. In this paper, chirp-coded excitation was evaluated to assess its ability to enhance the subharmonic and harmonic response of UCA. Acoustic measurements were conducted with a pair of single-element transducers at 10-MHz transmit frequencies to evaluate the subharmonic and harmonic response of Targestar-P^® (Targeson Inc., San Diego, CA, USA), a commercially available phospholipid-encapsulated contrast agent. The results of this study demonstrated a 2 - 3 fold reduction in the subharmonic threshold, and a 4 - 14 dB increase in nonlinear signal-to-noise ratio, with chirp-coded excitation. Therefore, chirp-coded excitation could be well suited for improving the imaging performance of high-frequency harmonic and subharmonic imaging.

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of reconstructing the mechanical properties of vascular tissues from axial and lateral displacement measurements from Synthetic Aperture (SA) ultrasound images. Modulus values were reconstructed with a soft priors technique. Studies were performed on simulated and experimental vessel phantoms to evaluate the quality of elastograms completed from axial displacements only, relative to those computed from axial and lateral displacements. Results demonstrated that modulus elastograms computed using both components were more accurate than those computed using one component of displacement.

A method for synthetic aperture tissue harmonic imaging is investigated. It combines synthetic aperture sequen- tial beamforming (SASB) with tissue harmonic imaging (THI) to produce an increased and more uniform spatial resolution and improved side lobe reduction compared to conventional B-mode imaging. Synthetic aperture sequential beamforming tissue harmonic imaging (SASB-THI) was implemented on a commercially available BK 2202 Pro Focus UltraView ultrasound system and compared to dynamic receive focused tissue harmonic imag- ing (DRF-THI) in clinical scans. The scan sequence that was implemented on the UltraView system acquires both SASB-THI and DRF-THI simultaneously. Twenty-four simultaneously acquired video sequences of in-vivo abdominal SASB-THI and DRF-THI scans on 3 volunteers of 4 different sections of liver and kidney tissues were created. Videos of the in-vivo scans were presented in double blinded studies to two radiologists for image quality performance scoring. Limitations to the systems transmit stage prevented user defined transmit apodization to be applied. Field II simulations showed that side lobes in SASB could be improved by using Hanning transmit apodization. Results from the image quality study show, that in the current configuration on the UltraView system, where no transmit apodization was applied, SASB-THI and DRF-THI produced equally good images. It is expected that given the use of transmit apodization, SASB-THI could be further improved.

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women. Early diagnosis can significantly improve lifeexpectancy and allow different treatment options. Clinicians favor 2D ultrasonography for breast tissue abnormality screening due to high sensitivity and specificity compared to competing technologies. However, inter- and intra-observer variability in visual assessment and reporting of lesions often handicaps its performance. Existing Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) systems though being able to detect solid lesions are often restricted in performance. These restrictions are inability to (1) detect lesion of multiple sizes and shapes, and (2) differentiate between hypo-echoic lesions from their posterior acoustic shadowing. In this work we present a completely automatic system for detection and segmentation of breast lesions in 2D ultrasound images. We employ random forests for learning of tissue specific primal to discriminate breast lesions from surrounding normal tissues. This enables it to detect lesions of multiple shapes and sizes, as well as discriminate between hypo-echoic lesion from associated posterior acoustic shadowing. The primal comprises of (i) multiscale estimated ultrasonic statistical physics and (ii) scale-space characteristics. The random forest learns lesion vs. background primal from a database of 2D ultrasound images with labeled lesions. For segmentation, the posterior probabilities of lesion pixels estimated by the learnt random forest are hard thresholded to provide a random walks segmentation stage with starting seeds. Our method achieves detection with 99.19% accuracy and segmentation with mean contour-to-contour error < 3 pixels on a set of 40 images with 49 lesions.

The goal of this paper is to investigate and evaluate image quality, based on quality metrics and visual perception in ultrasound imaging under different imaging conditions. We first generate and simulate Bmode ultrasound images of various objects, using Field-II simulation toolbox [1]. Then we implement and embed front-end functional modules, mid-end functions including beamforming, receive beamforming, envelop detection and log compression, and back-end image processing methods (filtering and image enhancement techniques). Ultrasound images are evaluated as pairs using various image quality evaluation metrics and visual perception evaluation. The experimental results of this study show that: (1) better image quality is significantly obtained using over-sampling and signal emphasizing (high-signal level); (2) normalized images with speckle filters are rated better in terms of index-quality; and (3) enhanced images show better visual perception on all simulation datasets. This paper shows the utility of our MATLAB test-bench favoring simulated image quality and further demonstrates that the evaluation design is an important pre-processing step especially for the hardware design of ultrasound system.

Ultrasound is widely used intra-operatively to provide real-time feedback in image guided intervention procedures. Registration of pre- and intra-operative images is a crucial step in the procedure. Unfortunately, real-time US images often have poor signal-to-noise ratio and suffer from imaging artifacts. Hence, registration using US images can be challenging and significant preprocessing is often required to make the registrations robust. The amount of preprocessing required can be reduced by incorporating US physical imaging process. However, progress in this research is hampered due to lack of publicly available database for training and testing image analysis algorithms that take in to consideration ultrasound physical process. We present here a new database that we are building to archive and distribute ultrasound images of an abdominal phantom acquired at different image acquisition parameters. The database contains tracking information of the transducer in addition to the 2D ultrasound image slices. We believe a publicly available database like this one will provide a valuable resource for the research community and it will be instrumental in developing a collaborative scientific community needed to advance the field.

The limited diffraction beams such as X-wave have the properties of larger depth of field. Thus, it has the potential to generate ultra-high frame rate ultrasound images. However, in practice, the real-time generation of X-wave ultrasonic field requires complex and high-cost system, especially the precise and specific voltage time distribution part for the excitation of each distinct array element. In order to simplify the hardware realization of X-wave, based on the previous works, X-wave excitation signals were decomposed and expressed as the superposition of a group of simple driving pulses, such as rectangular and triangular waves. The hardware system for the X-wave generator was also designed. The generator consists of a computer for communication with the circuit, universal serial bus (USB) based micro-controller unit (MCU) for data transmission, field programmable gate array (FPGA) based Direct Digital Synthesizer(DDS), 12-bit digital-to-analog (D/A) converter and a two stage amplifier.The hardware simulation results show that the designed system can generate the waveforms at different radius approximating the theoretical X-wave excitations with a maximum error of 0.49% triggered by the quantification of amplitude data.

Aperture synthesis using a forward-looking ring array is an area of current interest in intracardiac imaging [1]. In general, data from multiple transmits are coherently combined to implement the synthesis, and schemes for the specification of the transmit and receive array weightings of the component beams are required. Often schemes originating in narrowband imaging are applied to broadband, pulse-echo imaging, but the result is usually sidelobes that are very different from those of the narrowband scheme and a rotationally asymmetric two-way response. Beam asymmetry is a potential disadvantage since the orientation of the array with respect to strong sidelobe reflectors may not be controllable. In the present work, we look for pulse-echo aperture synthesis approaches that produce rotationally symmetric PSFs with low sidelobe levels. Such rotational asymmetry can be decreased by minimizing the maximum delay used in a broadband scheme, and we introduce the idea that this minimization can be accomplished by the combination of delays with phase inversions. We also consider the use of more elements, structured as two rings, in order to increase the number of degrees of freedom available in a small number of transmits. The latter approach allows the design of the desired rotationally symmetric PSFs, which also have much lower peak sidelobe levels than alternative schemes. The proposed scheme makes use of two transmissions per look direction of the dual-ring array. Simulations of planar imaging of spherical voids are presented to illustrate the potential contrast improvement of this approach.

In modern medical ultrasound signal processing, beamforming is usually implemented on H/W solution by ASIC(Application Specific Integrated Circuit) because of its huge computation. ASIC solution has a problem with flexibility to support various beamforming algorithms. Nowadays, computing ability of GPU(Graphic processing unit) becomes very high, therefore many approaches have been proposed for S/W beamforming on GPU. Although the high performance of GPU, commercial GPU is not proper for portable ultrasound, because of its large power consumption. The motivation of this paper is evaluating the feasibility of embedded multi-core system as S/W beamforming solution for portable ultrasound. To develop embedded S/W beamforming platform, we propose the platform with multiple embedded processors called RP(Reconfigurable Processor) and special co-processors. Whole system is composed of 6 computing clusters and single cluster is composed of 8 RP processors and 1 co-processor. The number of clusters in the system can be changed depending on computational requirement. To evaluate the performance of the proposed platform, we implemented MV(Minimum Variance) beamforming, which is one of the most complex beamforming, on that platform. 4 approaches were mainly used to accelerate MV beamforming. The first one is co-processor for accelerating MAC(Multiply and Accumulate) operations, the second one is special instructions for beamforming, the third one is SIMD(Single Instruction Multiple Data), and the last one is CGA(Corse Grained Architecture) acceleration which is special function of RP. As a final result, 128channel 30fps(frame per second) real-time MV beamformer was achieved on the proposed platform.

Advanced ultrasonic beamforming techniques are often computationally intensive and difficult to implement in real-time. GPU computing has become a vital tool for software beamforming because of its massive parallel computing capabilities. However, GPU-based software beamforming has not yet been integrated into a real-time imaging system. We have recently introduced short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) imaging as a coherence-based beamforming technique that is more robust to clutter than conventional B-mode imaging. The algorithm is computationally expensive, and has been limited to offline processing to date. By combining SLSC beamforming on the GPU with a Verasonics ultrasound scanner, we have realized a real-time side-by-side B-mode and SLSC imaging system capable of achieving up to 6 frames per second (fps). We demonstrate the system's real-time capabilities with phantom and in vivo scans, and briefly examine the relative performance of B-mode and SLSC imaging.

Previous studies concluded that the resolution limitation of travel-time tomography is the width of the first Fresnel zone. However, we believe that the resolution of ray tomography cannot simply be limited to the first Fresnel zone and is affected by many factors. In this study, we investigate a variety of factors that affect the resolving power of travel time tomography. These factors include accuracy of picked travel time, ray coverage (data density) and data signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We also investigate to what extent that bent-ray travel-time tomography is capable of resolving anomalous objects smaller than the first Fresnel zone based on numerical simulations. We have shown that bent-ray travel-time tomography resolvability and detectability of small objects is better than the first Fresnel zone.

Women with high breast density have an increased risk of developing breast cancer. Women treated with the selective estrogen receptor modulator tamoxifen for estrogen receptor positive breast cancer experience a 50% reduction in risk of contralateral breast cancer and overall reduction of similar magnitude has been identified among high-risk women receiving the drug for prevention. Tamoxifen has been shown to reduce mammographic density, and in the IBIS-1 chemoprevention trial, risk reduction and decline in density were significantly associated. Ultrasound tomography (UST) is an imaging modality that can create tomographic sound speed images of the breast. These sound speed images are useful because breast density is proportional to sound speed. The aim of this work is to examine the relationship between USTmeasured breast density and the use of tamoxifen. So far, preliminary results for a small number of patients have been observed and are promising. Correlations between the UST-measured density and mammographic density are strong and positive, while relationships between UST density with some patient specific risk factors behave as expected. Initial results of UST examinations of tamoxifen treated patients show that approximately 45% of the patients have a decrease in density in the contralateral breast after only several months of treatment. The true effect of tamoxifen on UST-measured density cannot yet be fully determined until more data are collected. However, these promising results suggest that UST can be used to reliably assess quantitative changes in breast density over short intervals and therefore suggest that UST may enable rapid assessment of density changes associated with therapeutic and preventative interventions.

Early detection of breast cancer is the key to reducing the cancer mortality rate. With increasing computational power, waveform inversion becomes feasible for high-resolution ultrasound tomography. Because of the limited measurement geometry, ultrasound waveform tomography is usually ill-posed, which requires certain computational methodologies to stabilize waveform inversion. We develop a new ultrasound waveform tomography method using a modified total-variation regularization for detecting and characterizing small breast tumors. To solve the minimization problem, we use an alternating-minimization algorithm in which the original optimization is equivalently decomposed into two simple subproblems. We use numerical breast-phantom data to demonstrate the improved capability of our new tomography method for accurately reconstructs the sound-speed values and shapes of small tumors.

Ultrasound waveform tomography using the conjugate gradient method produces images with different qualities in different regions of the imaging domain, partly because the ultrasound wave energy is dominant around transducer elements. In addition, this uneven distribution of the wave energy slows down the convergence of the inversion. Using the Hessian matrix to scale the gradients in waveform inversion can reduce the artifacts caused by the geometrical spreading and the defocusing effect resulting from the incomplete data coverage. However, it is computationally expensive to calculate the Hessian matrix. We develop a new ultrasound waveform tomography method that weights the gradient with the ultrasound wave energies of the forward and backward propagation wavefields. Our new method balances the wave energy distribution throughout the entire imaging domain. This method scales the gradients using the square root of the wave energy of forward propagated wavefields from sources and that of backpropagated synthetic wavefields from receivers. We numerically demonstrate that this new ultrasound waveform tomography method improves sound-speed reconstructions of breast tumors and accelerates the convergence of ultrasound waveform tomography.

Conventional ultrasound imaging based on scan conversion suffers from blurring artifacts caused by interpolation[1]. Especially, when zooming an image for enlarging lesions during scan conversion (i.e., read-zoom), this blurring artifact becomes severe. To reduce blurring artifacts, a write-zoom method was previously proposed. However, it still presents blurring artifacts and lowers the frame rate due to increased line density. In this paper, a new high definition zoom method based on compounded direct pixel beamforming (CDPB) capable enhancing the detail and boundary of lesions is presented. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated with phantom and in vivo experiments by measuring the information entropy contrast (IEC). The radio-frequency channel data were acquired by using a 3.5-MHz convex array transducer with the SonixTouch research platform (Ultrasonix Medical Corp., Vancouver, BC, Canada). The enlarged images using a new high-definition zoom method based on CDPB (i.e., HDZ-CDPB) with 128 transmit scanlines were reconstructed along with read- and write zoom (RZ and WZ) images based on scan conversion by using 128 and 256 transmit scanlines, respectively. From the phantom experiments, the IEC value with the proposed HDZCDPB method was enhanced by maximally 42% and 29% compared to the RZ and WZ methods, respectively. This preliminary results indicate that the proposed HDZ-CDPB method would be useful for generating a high definition ultrasound zoom image with improved image quality compared to the conventional scan conversion based methods (i.e., RZ and WZ) while achieving the high frame rate.

Modern medical ultrasound machines produce enormous amounts of data, as much as several gigabytes/sec in some systems. The difficulties of generating, propagating and processing such large amounts of data have motivated recent research into means for compression of the radio frequency (rf) signals received at an ultrasound system’s analog front end. Most of this work has concentrated on the digitized data available after sampling and A/D conversion. We are interested in the possibility of compression implemented directly on the received analog signals, so we focus on efficient real-time representations for the rf signals comprising a single receive aperture. We first derive an expression for the (time and space) autocorrelation function of the set of signals received in a linear aperture. This is then used to find the autocorrelation’s eigenfunctions, which form an optimal basis for minimum mean-square error (mmse) compression of the aperture signal set. Computation of the coefficients of the signal set with respect to the basis amounts to calculation of Fourier Series coefficients for the received signal at each aperture element, with frequencies scaled by aperture position, followed by linear combinations of corresponding frequency components across the aperture. The combination weights at each frequency are determined by the eigenvectors of a matrix whose entries are averaged cross-spectral coefficients of the received signal set at that frequency. The autocorrelation decomposition and signal set coefficients are also used to compute a linear mmse beamformed estimate of the aperture center line.

Ultrasonography has been conducting a critical role in assessing abdominal disorders due to its noninvasive, real-time, low cost, and deep penetrating capabilities. However, for imaging obese patients with a thick fat layer, it is challenging to achieve appropriate image quality with a conventional beamforming (CON) method due to phase aberration caused by the difference between sound speeds (e.g., 1580 and 1450m/s for liver and fat, respectively). For this, various sound speed correction (SSC) methods that estimate the accumulated sound speed for a region-of interest (ROI) have been previously proposed. However, with the SSC methods, the improvement in image quality was limited only for a specific depth of ROI. In this paper, we present the adaptive sound speed correction (ASSC) method, which can enhance the image quality for whole depths by using estimated sound speeds from two different depths in the lower layer. Since these accumulated sound speeds contain the respective contributions of layers, an optimal sound speed for each depth can be estimated by solving contribution equations. To evaluate the proposed method, the phantom study was conducted with pre-beamformed radio-frequency (RF) data acquired with a SonixTouch research package (Ultrasonix Corp., Canada) with linear and convex probes from the gel pad-stacked tissue mimicking phantom (Parker Lab. Inc., USA and Model539, ATS, USA) whose sound speeds are 1610 and 1450m/s, respectively. From the study, compared to the CON and SSC methods, the ASSC method showed the improved spatial resolution and information entropy contrast (IEC) for convex and linear array transducers, respectively. These results indicate that the ASSC method can be applied for enhancing image quality when imaging obese patients in abdominal ultrasonography.

In medical ultrasound imaging, high-performance beamforming is important to enhance spatial and contrast resolutions. A modern receive dynamic beamfomer uses a constant sound speed that is typically assumed to 1540 m/s in generating receive focusing delays [1], [2]. However, this assumption leads to degradation of spatial and contrast resolutions particularly when imaging obese patients or breast since the sound speed is significantly lower than the assumed sound speed [3]; the true sound speed in the fatty tissue is around 1450 m/s. In our previous study, it was demonstrated that the modified nonlinear anisotropic diffusion is capable of determining an optimal sound speed and the proposed method is a useful tool to improve ultrasound image quality [4], [5]. In the previous study, however, we utilized at least 21 iterations to find an optimal sound speed, which may not be viable for real-time applications. In this paper, we demonstrates that the number of iterations can be dramatically reduced using the GSS(golden section search) method with a minimal error. To evaluate performances of the proposed method, in vitro experiments were conducted with a tissue mimicking phantom. To emulate a heterogeneous medium, the phantom was immersed in the water. From the experiments, the number of iterations was reduced from 21 to 7 with GSS method and the maximum error of the lateral resolution between direct and GSS was less than 1%. These results indicate that the proposed method can be implemented in real time to improve the image quality in the medical ultrasound imaging.

Clinical intracranial ultrasound (US) is performed as a standard of care on neonates at risk of intraventricular hemorrhaging (IVH) and is also used after a diagnosis to monitor for potential ventricular dilation. However, it is difficult to estimate the volume of ventricles with 2D US due to their irregular shape. We developed a 3D US system to be used as an adjunct to a clinical system to investigate volumetric changes in the ventricles of neonates with IVH. Our system has been found have an error of within 1% of actual distance measurements in all three directions and volume measurements of manually segmented volumes from phantoms were not statistically significantly different from the actual values (p>0.3). Interobserver volume measurements of the lateral ventricles in a patient with grade III IVH found no significant differences between measurements. There is the potential to use this system in IVH patients to monitor the progression of ventriculomegaly over time.

Silicone based impression-taking of prepared teeth followed by plaster casting is well-established but potentially less reliable, error-prone and inefficient, particularly in combination with emerging techniques like computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) of dental prosthesis. Intra-oral optical scanners for digital impression-taking have been introduced but until now some drawbacks still exist. Because optical waves can hardly penetrate liquids or soft-tissues, sub-gingival preparations still need to be uncovered invasively prior to scanning. High frequency ultrasound (HFUS) based micro-scanning has been recently investigated as an alternative to optical intra-oral scanning. Ultrasound is less sensitive against oral fluids and in principal able to penetrate gingiva without invasively exposing of sub-gingival preparations. Nevertheless, spatial resolution as well as digitization accuracy of an ultrasound based micro-scanning system remains a critical parameter because the ultrasound wavelength in water-like media such as gingiva is typically smaller than that of optical waves. In this contribution, the in-vitro accuracy of ultrasound based micro-scanning for tooth geometry reconstruction is being investigated and compared to its extra-oral optical counterpart. In order to increase the spatial resolution of the system, 2^nd harmonic frequencies from a mechanically driven focused single element transducer were separated and corresponding 3D surface models were calculated for both fundamentals and 2^nd harmonics. Measurements on phantoms, model teeth and human teeth were carried out for evaluation of spatial resolution and surface detection accuracy. Comparison of optical and ultrasound digital impression taking indicate that, in terms of accuracy, ultrasound based tooth digitization can be an alternative for optical impression-taking.

Imaging breast microcalcifications is crucial for early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. It is challenging for current clinical ultrasound to image breast microcalcifications. However, new imaging techniques using data acquired with a synthetic-aperture ultrasound system have the potential to significantly improve ultrasound imaging. We recently developed a super-resolution ultrasound imaging method termed the phase-coherent multiple-signal classification (PC-MUSIC). This signal subspace method accounts for the phase response of transducer elements to improve image resolution. In this paper, we investigate the clinical feasibility of our super-resolution ultrasound imaging method for detecting breast microcalcifications. We use our custom-built, real-time synthetic-aperture ultrasound system to acquire breast ultrasound data for 40 patients whose mammograms show the presence of breast microcalcifications. We apply our super-resolution ultrasound imaging method to the patient data, and produce clear images of breast calcifications. Our super-resolution ultrasound PC-MUSIC imaging with synthetic-aperture ultrasound data can provide a new imaging modality for detecting breast microcalcifications in clinic without using ionizing radiation.