Blocked element compensation in phased array imaging

Li, P.-C.; Flax, Stephen W.; Ebbini, E.S.; O’Donnell, M.

doi:10.1109/58.251276

Cited by 51 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Li and O'Donnell [25,26] devised ways to restore image quality degraded when elements are blocked or receiving strong reverberations. These can be detected simply by looking at the receive amplitude.…”

Section: B Compensating For Blocked Acoustic Pathsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conformable transducers for large-volume, operator-independent imaging

Daft

2010

2010 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium

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While ultrasound's cost, safety and interesting contrast mechanisms are of great clinical value, its operatordependence, extensive sonographer training needs, uncompetitive scan times, poor ergonomics and low reproducibility in serial studies limit its proliferation. This paper examines opportunities to solve these problems and increase ultrasound's application space via arrays which conform to the patient's body contours. Progress towards a conformable array maintaining ultrasound's existing feature set has been promising, but a complete system is yet to be demonstrated. The article first outlines the motivation for such arrays, defines design requirements, and describes an ideal design. Next, work on partial hardware realizations of conformable arrays is reviewed, and types of signal processing specific to conformable systems are discussed. Finally, future research directions are envisioned.Operator-independent ultrasound requires large acquisition volumes with voxels isotropic enough to allow post-scan clinical assessment without regard for scanning geometry. Information rate is presented as a useful metric to compare the diagnostic utility of these systems. Two new hardware realizations are described to illustrate progress towards the conformable array goal. An automated breast-scanning design with a matrix receiver using silicon transducers (cMUTs) shows provocative performance in a micro-calcification detection simulation. A reconfigurable matrix array, also using cMUTs, provides volume imaging performance characteristic of a fully-sampled aperture with sufficiently modest interconnect demands to be feasible in a transesophageal echo (TEE) application.

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Section: B Compensating For Blocked Acoustic Pathsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conformable transducers for large-volume, operator-independent imaging

Daft

2010

2010 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium

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“…Another notable blocked-element compensation technique was developed by Li et al [9]. They used the information from multiple receive beams to estimate locations and amplitudes of acoustic sources and to suppress the undesired side-lobe contributions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification and impact of blocked elements in 1-D and 2-D arrays

Jakovljevic

Dahl

Trahey

2013

2013 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS)

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In an attempt to characterize the signals on the blocked elements and to assess the image degradation they cause we collected the individual-channel signals from a clinical matrix array on a phantom through a layer of absorbing rubber and on the human liver intercostally. The signal amplitude and nearest-neighbor normalized cross-correlation exhibited significantly lower values for the blocked elements than for the remaining elements on the aperture. The channel-signals were summed coherently in the elevation dimension to create a synthetic receive 1-D aperture data-set. B-mode images of liver vasculature that were created for a growing synthetic 1-D aperture indicate that beamforming with the blocked elements turned off can reduce noise and improve visibility of targets.

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“…Adaptive sidelobe-reduction techniques can also be used to reduce focusing imperfections [4]- [6], one example of which is the parallel adaptive receive-compensation algorithm (PARCA) [4]. Another adaptive sidelobe-reduction method is based on the use of the coherence factor (CF) of the receive-channel data [5], which represents a focusing-quality index:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

P3D-1 Coherence-Based Adaptive Breast Imaging with Clinical Data

Wang¹,

Chang²,

Yang³

et al. 2006

2006 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium

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Sound-velocity inhomogeneities degrade both the spatial resolution and the contrast in diagnostic ultrasound. We previously proposed an adaptive imaging approach based on the coherence of the data received in the channels of a transducer array, and tested it on phantom data. In this study the approach was tested on clinical breast data, and compared with a correlation-based method that has been widely reported in the literature. The main limitations of the correlation-based method in ultrasonic breast imaging are the use of a near-field phase-screen model and the integration errors due to the lack of a 2D array. In contrast, the proposed coherence-based method adaptively weights each image pixel based on the coherence of the receive-channel data. It does not make any assumption about the source of the focusing errors and has been shown to be effective using 1D arrays. This study tested its in vivo performance using clinical breast data acquired by a programmable system with a 5 MHz, 128-channel linear array. Twenty-five cases (six fibroadenomas, ten carcinomas, six cysts, and three abscesses) were investigated. Relative to nonweighted imaging, the average improvements in the contrast ratio and contrast-to-noise ratio for the coherence-based method were 8.57 dB and 23.2%, respectively, whereas the corresponding improvements when using the correlation-based method were only 0.42 dB and 3.35%. In an investigated microcalcification case, the improvement in the contrast was 4.47 dB and the axial and lateral dimensions of the object were reduced from 0.39 to 0.32 mm and from 0.51 to 0.43 mm, respectively. These results demonstrate the efficacy of the coherence-based method for clinical ultrasonic breast imaging using 1D arrays.

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Blocked element compensation in phased array imaging

Cited by 51 publications

References 20 publications

Conformable transducers for large-volume, operator-independent imaging

Conformable transducers for large-volume, operator-independent imaging

Identification and impact of blocked elements in 1-D and 2-D arrays

P3D-1 Coherence-Based Adaptive Breast Imaging with Clinical Data

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