Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea.
IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2012 Mar;59(3):573-82. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2012.2231.
In this paper, a new compounded direct pixel beamforming (CDPB) method is presented to remove blurring artifacts introduced by ultrasound scan conversion. In CDPB, receive focusing is directly performed on each display pixel in Cartesian coordinates using the raw RF data from adjacent transmit firings so that artifacts from the scan conversion can be removed. In addition, the energy variations resulting from the distance between the transmit scanline and display pixel are compensated by utilizing the gain factor obtained from the ultrasound beam pattern. The proposed CDPB method was evaluated using simulation and in vivo liver data acquired by a commercial ultrasound machine equipped with a research package. The experimental results showed that the proposed CDPB method improved the information entropy contrast (IEC) by 23.6% compared with the conventional scan conversion method and it reduced the blocking artifacts factor (BAF) by 16.4% over the direct pixel-based focusing method. These results indicate the proposed new direct pixel beamforming method could be used to enhance image quality in medical ultrasound imaging.
本文提出了一种新的复合直接像素波束形成（CDPB）方法，用于去除超声扫描变换引入的模糊伪影。在 CDBP 中，直接在笛卡尔坐标系中的每个显示像素上执行接收聚焦，使用来自相邻发射触发的原始 RF 数据，从而可以去除扫描变换引起的伪影。此外，通过利用从超声束模式获得的增益因子，补偿了由于发射扫描线和显示像素之间的距离引起的能量变化。使用配备研究包的商业超声机采集的模拟和体内肝脏数据对所提出的 CDBP 方法进行了评估。实验结果表明，与传统的扫描变换方法相比，所提出的 CDBP 方法将信息熵对比度（IEC）提高了 23.6%，与基于直接像素的聚焦方法相比，它将阻塞伪影因子（BAF）降低了 16.4%。这些结果表明，所提出的新的直接像素波束形成方法可用于增强医学超声成像中的图像质量。
