Description
Ultrasound imaging is one of the major medical imaging modalities. It is cheap, non-invasive and has low power consumption. Doppler processing is an important part of many ultrasound imaging systems. It is used to provide blood velocity information and is built on top of B-mode systems. We investigate the performance of two velocity estimation schemes used in Doppler processing systems, namely, directional velocity estimation (DVE) and conventional velocity estimation (CVE). We find that DVE provides better estimation performance and is the only functioning method when the beam to flow angle is large. Unfortunately, DVE is computationally expensive and also requires divisions and square root operations that are hard to implement. We propose two approximation techniques to replace these computations. The simulation results on cyst images show that the proposed approximations do not affect the estimation performance. We also study backend processing which includes envelope detection, log compression and scan conversion. Three different envelope detection methods are compared. Among them, FIR based Hilbert Transform is considered the best choice when phase information is not needed, while quadrature demodulation is a better choice if phase information is necessary. Bilinear and Gaussian interpolation are considered for scan conversion. Through simulations of a cyst image, we show that bilinear interpolation provides comparable contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) performance with Gaussian interpolation and has lower computational complexity. Thus, bilinear interpolation is chosen for our system.
Details
Title
- Increasing the efficiency of Doppler processing and backend processing in medical ultrasound systems
Contributors
- Wei, Siyuan (Author)
- Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor)
- Frakes, David (Committee member)
- Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2013
Subjects
Resource Type
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Note
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thesisPartial requirement for: M.S., Arizona State University, 2013
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bibliographyIncludes bibliographical references (p. 50-52)
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Field of study: Electrical engineering
Citation and reuse
Statement of Responsibility
by Siyuan Wei