Wireless, Real-Time Plane-Wave Coherent Compounding on an iPhone: A Feasibility Study.

Cameron Lowell Palmer,Ole Marius Hoel Rindal

doi:10.1109/tuffc.2019.2914555

Abstract

The processing power in commercially available hand-held devices has improved dramatically in recent years. In parallel, techniques used in high-frame-rate medical ultrasound imaging, especially plane-wave (PW) imaging, have reduced the number of ultrasound transmissions and amount of data necessary to reconstruct an ultrasound image. In combination, the processing power and data reduction allow all of the processing steps in ultrasound image formation, from raw ultrasound channel data to final rendering, to be performed on a hand-held device. In this study, we send the raw ultrasound channel data from a research scanner wirelessly to an off-the-shelf hand-held device. The hand-held unit's graphical processing unit is processing the raw ultrasound data into the final image, achieving real-time frame rates on the order of 60-90 frames per second (FPS) for a single-angle PW transmission. Higher quality images are achieved by trading off frame rate by coherently compounding multiple PW images, resulting in frame rates on the order of, e.g., 13 FPS when coherently compounding 7 PW transmissions. The presented setup has the potential of providing image quality which could be valuable for simple medical ultrasound diagnostic scans of, e.g., the carotid artery or thyroid. Also, since the computationally expensive beamforming can be done in off-the-shelf devices, this could reduce the price of hand-held ultrasound systems in the future.

Highlights

H AND-HELD ultrasound systems are receiving increased attention and use [1], [2], and Godt [3] has predicted hand-held ultrasound will even replace the physician’s stethoscope
Compared to our previous study, we have introduced coherent PW compounded (CPWC) imaging and expanding aperture imaging resulting in higher image quality, and several improvements to the processing chain resulting in dramatic improvements to the processing frame rate
We have demonstrated real-time, CPWC, ultrasound imaging with the processing handled by off-the-shelf devices such as the iPhone and iPad Pro

Summary

Introduction

H AND-HELD ultrasound systems are receiving increased attention and use [1], [2], and Godt [3] has predicted hand-held ultrasound will even replace the physician’s stethoscope. Ultrasound signal processing and image creation are computationally expensive. Most clinical high-end ultrasound scanners used specialized hardware to do ultrasound image formation. Ultrasound image formation, known as beamforming, is done by converting and Manuscript received January 28, 2019; accepted April 26, 2019. Date of publication May 2, 2019; date of current version July 10, 2019.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion