Abstract
For medical ultrasound imaging, the dynamic receive beamforming is important for improving image quality, i.e., spatial and contrast resolution. In current dynamic receive beamforming, a constant sound speed (e.g., 1540m/s) is assumed. However, the sound speed dispersed in soft tissues leads to defocusing and degradation of image quality. Various methods have been proposed to estimate the proper sound speed with received data, but these methods have not been verified their performance in clinical cases (e.g., breast tissue). In this paper, the five different sound speed estimation methods (i.e., coherent factor (CF), minimum average phase variance (MAPV), minimum average sum-of-absolute difference (MASAD), focus quality spectra (FQS), and modified nonlinear anisotropic difference (MNAD)) are evaluated with the tissue mimicking phantom and the in vivo breast data under the same condition. The pre-beamformed radio-frequency data (RF) for the tissue mimicking phantom and in vivo breast data are acquired using a 7.5-MHz linear array transducer with the SonixTouch research platform connected to the SonixDAQ parallel data acquisition system. In the phantom study, the five methods show considerable performance in estimating the optimal sound speed (i.e., 1450 ± 25 m/s). The CF and FQS methods also show the low errors in the in vivo breast study, but the MAPV, MASAD and MNAD methods have difficulty in estimating the optimal sound speed (1530 m/s) i.e., 25.0 ± 12.9 and 20.0 ± 8.2 vs. 72.5 ± 45.0, 72.5 ± 41.9, 52.5 ± 28.7, respectively. These results indicated that the CF and FQS methods can robustly estimate the optimal sound speed in the homogenous phantom and heterogeneous soft tissues (e.g., breast).
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS |
Publisher | IEEE Computer Society |
Pages | 1678-1681 |
Number of pages | 4 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781479970490 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 20 Oct 2014 |
Event | 2014 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS 2014 - Chicago, United States Duration: 3 Sep 2014 → 6 Sep 2014 |
Publication series
Name | IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS |
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ISSN (Print) | 1948-5719 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1948-5727 |
Conference
Conference | 2014 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS 2014 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Chicago |
Period | 3/09/14 → 6/09/14 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2014 IEEE.
Keywords
- Breast
- Optimal sound speed
- Ultrasound imaging