Abstract
Ultrasonic image generation based on Synthetic Aperture Focusing Techniques (SAFT) can be divided into two stages: (1) the excitation and acquisition stage, where the signals received by each element or group of elements are stored; and (2) the beamforming stage, where the signals are combined together to obtain the image pixels. The use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can significantly reduce the computing time of this last stage, that usually includes di_erent functions such as dynamic focusing, band-pass filtering, spatial filtering or envelope detection. This work studies the parallelization of the beamforming process for ultrasonic imaging and presents its implementation using GPGPU techniques (General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Units). We also consider the execution times from the number of signals involved and the desired image dimensions. Experimental results show that using GPU can accelerate, in more than one order of magnitude with respect to CPU implementations, the beamforming and post-processing algorithms making possible the development of real time SAFT imaging systems.
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