KEYWORDS: Ultrasonography, Data conversion, Data acquisition, Raster graphics, Tissues, Medical imaging, Imaging systems, Signal processing, Transducers, Chemical elements
In medical ultrasound imaging, scan conversion is used to geometrically transform polar coordinate ultrasound data
into Cartesian raster data for display. In scan conversion, Moiré undersampling artifacts can be avoided by using
various interpolation techniques such as nearest neighbor and bilinear. However, this interpolation-based scan
conversion introduces blurring of fine details in ultrasound images. In this paper, a new beamforming technique, named
compounded direct pixel beamforming (CDPB), is proposed to remove blurring artifacts from scan conversion. In
CDPB, receive focusing is performed directly on each display pixel in Cartesian coordinates with raw radio-frequency
(RF) data from two adjacent transmit firings so that artifacts from scan conversion can be substantially removed. To
evaluate the proposed CDPB method, 64-channel pre-beamformed RF data were captured by a commercial ultrasound
machine (SA-9900, Medison Corp., Seoul, Korea) from a tissue mimicking phantom (ATS Laboratories, Bridgeport, CT,
USA). To quantify the performance of the proposed method, the information entropy contrast (IEC) value was
measured. From the experiments, the proposed method provided IEC improvement by 2.8 over the conventional scan
conversion method. These results indicate that the proposed new beamforming method could be used for enhancing the
image quality in medical ultrasound imaging.
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