IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2011 Aug;58(8):1698-705. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2011.1999.
Although they show potential to improve ultrasound image quality, plane wave (PW) compounding and synthetic aperture (SA) imaging are computationally demanding and are known to be challenging to implement in real-time. In this work, we have developed a novel beamformer architecture with the real-time parallel processing capacity needed to enable fast realization of PW compounding and SA imaging. The beamformer hardware comprises an array of graphics processing units (GPUs) that are hosted within the same computer workstation. Their parallel computational resources are controlled by a pixel-based software processor that includes the operations of analytic signal conversion, delay-and-sum beamforming, and recursive compounding as required to generate images from the channel-domain data samples acquired using PW compounding and SA imaging principles. When using two GTX-480 GPUs for beamforming and one GTX-470 GPU for recursive compounding, the beamformer can compute compounded 512 x 255 pixel PW and SA images at throughputs of over 4700 fps and 3000 fps, respectively, for imaging depths of 5 cm and 15 cm (32 receive channels, 40 MHz sampling rate). Its processing capacity can be further increased if additional GPUs or more advanced models of GPU are used.
尽管它们显示出改善超声图像质量的潜力，但平面波（PW）复合和合成孔径（SA）成像是计算密集型的，并且已知难以实时实现。在这项工作中，我们开发了一种新的波束形成器架构，具有实时并行处理能力，可实现 PW 复合和 SA 成像的快速实现。波束形成器硬件包括一个图形处理单元（GPU）阵列，这些 GPU 位于同一台计算机工作站中。它们的并行计算资源由一个基于像素的软件处理器控制，该处理器包括所需的分析信号转换、延迟和求和波束形成以及递归复合操作，以便从使用 PW 复合和 SA 成像原理获得的通道域数据样本中生成图像。当使用两个 GTX-480 GPU 进行波束形成和一个 GTX-470 GPU 进行递归复合时，波束形成器可以分别以超过 4700 fps 和 3000 fps 的速度计算复合的 512 x 255 像素 PW 和 SA 图像，对于 5 cm 和 15 cm 的成像深度（32 个接收通道，40 MHz 采样率）。如果使用更多的 GPU 或更先进的 GPU 模型，其处理能力可以进一步提高。
