Asynchronous compressed beamformer for portable diagnostic ultrasound systems

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Portable ultrasound systems face limitations in imaging quality due to power and form factor constraints.
• Existing systems often compromise image resolution for portability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a low-complexity, low-power asynchronous compressed beamformer (ACB) for portable diagnostic ultrasound.
• To enhance ultrasound imaging quality while reducing power consumption and data volume.

Main Methods:

• Integration of asynchronous sampling and compressive sensing (CS) within the ACB architecture.
• Utilization of a high-rate continuous-time ternary encoding (CT-TE) scheme to eliminate interpolation and CORDIC units.
• Application of a split-projection least squares (SPLS) algorithm for efficient signal reconstruction.

Main Results:

• The proposed ACB architecture effectively reduces data conversion power and manages large data volumes.
• The CT-TE scheme simplifies the conventional beamformer architecture.
• The SPLS algorithm provides a low-complexity alternative to nonlinear signal recovery.
• Experiments demonstrated a 9-fold data compression compared to Nyquist sampling using measured ultrasound data.

Conclusions:

• The developed ACB, coupled with the SPLS algorithm, offers a significant advancement for portable ultrasound imaging.
• This approach enhances imaging quality and data compression, addressing key limitations of current portable systems.