A Low-Complexity and High-Resolution Beamformer for Portable Medical Ultrasound Imaging.

Abstract

So far, researchers have proposed various methods to improve the quality of medical ultrasound imaging. However, in portable medical ultrasound imaging systems, features, such as low cost and low power consumption for battery longevity, are very important. Hence, most of the proposed algorithms have not been proper substitutes for the delay and sum (DAS) algorithm in portable clinical applications due to their high computational complexity and cost. In this article, a new algorithm is presented concentrating on reducing the computational complexity based on a technique that separates the signal from the correlated interferences to overcome the negative characteristics, particularly for portable applications such as high price, high power consumption, and off-axis clutters in the azimuth direction. Also, the proposed algorithm yields a higher contrast compared to that of the DAS algorithm while achieving a similar computation complexity order of O ( n ) similar to the DAS algorithm. Furthermore, the performed simulations confirm that the proposed method is able to achieve a better resolution almost twice as that of the filtered delay multiply and sum (F-DMAS) algorithm with the same sidelobe level.