This paper presents a preliminary evaluation work on a pre-designed 3-D ultrasound imaging system. The system mainly consists of four parts, a 7.5MHz, 24×24 2-D array transducer, the transmit/receive circuit, power supply, data acquisition and real-time imaging module. The row-column addressing scheme is adopted for the transducer fabrication, which greatly reduces the number of active channels . The element area of the transducer is 4.6mm by 4.6mm. Four kinds of tests were carried out to evaluate the imaging performance, including the penetration depth range, axial and lateral resolution, positioning accuracy and 3-D imaging frame rate. Several strong reflection metal objects , fixed in a water tank, were selected for the purpose of imaging due to a low signal-to-noise ratio of the transducer. The distance between the transducer and the tested objects , the thickness of aluminum, and the seam width of the aluminum sheet were measured by a calibrated micrometer to evaluate the penetration depth, the axial and lateral resolution, respectively. The experiment al results showed that the imaging penetration depth range was from 1.0cm to 6.2cm, the axial and lateral resolution were 0.32mm and 1.37mm respectively, the imaging speed was up to 27 frames per second and the positioning accuracy was 9.2%.
This paper presents a work of real-time 3-D image reconstruction for a 7.5-MHz, 24×24 row-column addressing array transducer. The transducer works with a predesigned transmit/receive module. After the raw data are captured by the NI PXIe data acquisition (DAQ) module, the following processing procedures are performed: delay and sum (DAS), base-line calibration, envelope detection, logarithm compression, down-sampling, gray scale mapping and 3-D display. These procedures are optimized for obtaining real-time 3-D images. Fixed-point focusing scheme is applied in delay and sum (DAS) to obtain line data from channel data. Zero-phase high-pass filter is used to calibrate the base-line shift of echo. The classical Hilbert transformation is adopted to detect the envelopes of echo. Logarithm compression is implemented to enlarge the weak signals and narrow the gap from the strong ones. Down-sampling reduces the amount of data to improve the processing speed. Linear gray scale mapping is introduced that the weakest signal is mapped to 0 and the strongest signal 255. The real-time 3-D images are displayed with multi-planar mode, which shows three orthogonal sections (vertical section, coronal section, transverse section). A trigger signal is sent from the transmit/receive module to the DAQ module at the start of each volume data generation to ensure synchronization between these two modules. All procedures, include data acquisition (DAQ), signal processing and image display, are programmed on the platform of LabVIEW. 675MB raw echo data are acquired in one minute to generate 24×24×48, 27fps 3-D images. The experiment on the strong reflection object (aluminum slice) shows the feasibility of the whole process from raw data to real-time 3-D images.
KEYWORDS: Image filtering, Linear filtering, Ultrasonography, Digital filtering, Image enhancement, Signal processing, Image resolution, Data acquisition, Image quality, Chromium
Ultrasound image quality enhancement is a problem of considerable interest in medical imaging modality and an ongoing challenge to date. This paper investigates a method based on frequency-shift low-pass filtering (FSLF) and least mean square adaptive filtering (LMSAF) for ultrasound image quality enhancement. FSLF is used for processing the ultrasound signal in the frequency domain, while LMSAPF in the time domain. Firstly, FSLF shifts the center frequency of the focused signal to zero. Then the real and imaginary part of the complex data are filtered respectively by finite impulse response (FIR) low-pass filter. Thus the information around the center frequency are retained while the undesired ones, especially background noises are filtered. Secondly, LMSAF multiplies the signals with an automatically adjusted weight vector to further eliminate the noises and artifacts. Through the combination of the two filters, the ultrasound image is expected to have less noises and artifacts and higher resolution, and contrast. The proposed method was verified with the RF data of the CIRS phantom 055A captured by SonixTouch DAQ system. Experimental results show that the background noises and artifacts can be efficiently restrained, the wire object has a higher resolution and the contrast ratio (CR) can be enhanced for about 12dB to 15dB at different image depth comparing to delay-and-sum (DAS).
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