Adaptive clutter rejection for 3D color Doppler imaging: preliminary clinical study.

In three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound color Doppler imaging (CDI), effective rejection of flash artifacts caused by tissue motion (clutter) is important for improving sensitivity in visualizing blood flow in vessels. Since clutter characteristics can vary significantly during volume acquisition, a clutter rejection technique that can adapt to the underlying clutter conditions is desirable for 3D CDI. We have previously developed an adaptive clutter rejection (ACR) method, in which an optimum filter is dynamically selected from a set of predesigned clutter filters based on the measured clutter characteristics. In this article, we evaluated the ACR method with 3D in vivo data acquired from 37 kidney transplant patients clinically indicated for a duplex ultrasound examination. We compared ACR against a conventional clutter rejection method, down-mixing (DM), using a commonly-used flow signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) and a new metric called fractional residual clutter area (FRCA). The ACR method was more effective in removing the flash artifacts while providing higher sensitivity in detecting blood flow in the arcuate arteries and veins in the parenchyma of transplanted kidneys. ACR provided 3.4 dB improvement in SCR over the DM method (11.4 +/- 1.6 dB versus 8.0 +/- 2.0 dB, p < 0.001) and had lower average FRCA values compared with the DM method (0.006 +/- 0.003 versus 0.036 +/- 0.022, p < 0.001) for all study subjects. These results indicate that the new ACR method is useful for removing nonstationary tissue motion while improving the image quality for visualizing 3D vascular structure in 3D CDI.

Ultrasound phase rotation beamforming on multi-core DSP.

Phase rotation beamforming (PRBF) is a commonly-used digital receive beamforming technique. However, due to its high computational requirement, it has traditionally been supported by hardwired architectures, e.g., application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or more recently field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In this study, we investigated the feasibility of supporting software-based PRBF on a multi-core DSP. To alleviate the high computing requirement, the analog front-end (AFE) chips integrating quadrature demodulation in addition to analog-to-digital conversion were defined and used. With these new AFE chips, only delay alignment and phase rotation need to be performed by DSP, substantially reducing the computational load. We implemented the delay alignment and phase rotation modules on a Texas Instruments C6678 DSP with 8 cores. We found it takes 200 µs to beamform 2048 samples from 64 channels using 2 cores. With 4 cores, 20 million samples can be beamformed in one second. Therefore, ADC frequencies up to 40 MHz with 2:1 decimation in AFE chips or up to 20 MHz with no decimation can be supported as long as the ADC-to-DSP I/O requirement can be met. The remaining 4 cores can work on back-end processing tasks and applications, e.g., color Doppler or ultrasound elastography. One DSP being able to handle both beamforming and back-end processing could lead to low-power and low-cost ultrasound machines, benefiting ultrasound imaging in general, particularly portable ultrasound machines.

Research interface on a programmable ultrasound scanner.

MOTIVATION: Commercial ultrasound machines in the past did not provide the ultrasound researchers access to raw ultrasound data. Lack of this ability has impeded evaluation and clinical testing of novel ultrasound algorithms and applications. OBJECTIVES: Recently, we developed a flexible ultrasound back-end where all the processing for the conventional ultrasound modes, such as B, M, color flow and spectral Doppler, was performed in software. The back-end has been incorporated into a commercial ultrasound machine, the Hitachi HiVision 5500. The goal of this work is to develop an ultrasound research interface on the back-end for acquiring raw ultrasound data from the machine. METHODS: The research interface has been designed as a software module on the ultrasound back-end. To increase the amount of raw ultrasound data that can be spooled in the limited memory available on the back-end, we have developed a method that can losslessly compress the ultrasound data in real time. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The raw ultrasound data could be obtained in any conventional ultrasound mode, including duplex and triplex modes. Furthermore, use of the research interface does not decrease the frame rate or otherwise affect the clinical usability of the machine. The lossless compression of the ultrasound data in real time can increase the amount of data spooled by approximately 2.3 times, thus allowing more than 6s of raw ultrasound data to be acquired in all the modes. The interface has been used not only for early testing of new ideas with in vitro data from phantoms, but also for acquiring in vivo data for fine-tuning ultrasound applications and conducting clinical studies. We present several examples of how newer ultrasound applications, such as elastography, vibration imaging and 3D imaging, have benefited from this research interface. Since the research interface is entirely implemented in software, it can be deployed on existing HiVision 5500 ultrasound machines and may be easily upgraded in the future. CONCLUSIONS: The developed research interface can aid researchers in the rapid testing and clinical evaluation of new ultrasound algorithms and applications. Additionally, we believe that our approach would be applicable to designing research interfaces on other ultrasound machines.

Automatic image-based gating for 4D ultrasound.

Four-dimensional (4D) ultrasound can be a powerful tool in adult and fetal echocardiography, enabling physicians to visualize planes that are not easily accessible using 2D ultrasound. However, despite the advances in the transducer technology, gating is still required to avoid motion artifacts during acquisition using mechanical probes or even 2D matrix array transducers in case of extended volume or color Doppler acquisitions. In fetal echocardiography, where an ECG signal is not readily available, image gating is used, which can both be computationally expensive and/or require user interaction. We present a new image gating technique that has both low computational requirements and is fully automatic. It is not only suitable for real-time gating of 4D ultrasound data sets during acquisition, but also suits well for lower-cost systems where computing resources are at a premium.