Fourier Domain Beamforming for Medical Ultrasound

Abstract: Sonography techniques use multiple transducer elements for tissue visualization. Signals detected at each element are sampled prior to digital beamforming. The required sampling rates are up to 4 times the Nyquist rate of the signal and result in considerable amount of data, that needs to be stored and processed. A developed technique, based on the finite rate of innovation model, compressed sensing (CS) and Xampling ideas, allows to reduce the number of samples needed to reconstruct an image comprised of strong reflectors. A significant drawback of this method is its inability to treat speckle, which is of significant importance in medical imaging. Here we build on previous work and show explicitly how to perform beamforming in the Fourier domain. Beamforming in frequency exploits the low bandwidth of the beamformed signal and allows to bypass the oversampling dictated by digital implementation of beamforming in time. We show that this allows to obtain the same beamformed image as in standard beamforming but from far fewer samples. Finally, we present an analysis based CS-technique that allows for further reduction in sampling rate, using only a portion of the beamformed signal's bandwidth, namely, sampling the signal at sub-Nyquist rates. We demonstrate our methods on in vivo cardiac ultrasound data and show that reductions up to 1/25 over standard beamforming rates are possible.