GPU based 3D SAFT reconstruction including phase aberration

Abstract

3D ultrasound computer tomography (3D USCT) promises reproducible high-resolution images for early detection of breast tumors. The KIT prototype provides three different modalities (reflectivity, speed of sound (SOS), and attenuation). For high resolution reflectivity images phase aberration correction using the SOS images is necessary. The synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) used for reflectivity image reconstruction is highly compute-intensive but suitable for an accelerated execution on GPUs. In this paper we investigate how the calculation of the phase aberration correction can be optimized and integrated into the SAFT algorithm. We analysed different strategies to optimize the trade off between memory requirement and image quality. For 64 slices with 1024 2 pixels a reconstruction can be done in 34 min on eight GPUs with a performance of 58.4 GV/s in comparison to the GPU reconstruction without phase aberration correction which needs 23 min. The average error made by the optimized SOS calculation is negligible.