Digital Beamforming

Beamforming
Manipulation of transmit and receive apertures.
Trade-off performance/cost to achieve:

Steer and focus the transmit beam.

Dynamically steer and focus the receive beam.
Provide accurate delay and apodization.
Provide dynamic receive control.

Beam Formation as Spatial Filtering

object

propagation

beam
formation

Propagation can be viewed as a process of linear

filtering (convolution).
Beam formation can be viewed as an inverse filter (or
others, such as a matched filter).

Implementaiton of Beam Formation

Delay is simply based on geometry.
Weighting (a.k.a. apodization) strongly
depends on the specific approach.

Beam Formation - Delay

Delay is based on geometry. For simplicity, a
constant sound velocity and straight line
propagation are assumed. Multiple reflection
is also ignored.
In diagnostic ultrasound, we are almost
always in the near field. Therefore, focusing is
necessary.

Beam Formation - Delay

Near field / far field crossover occurs
when f#=aperture size/wavelength.
The crossover also corresponds to the
point where the phase error across the
aperture becomes significant
(destructive).

Beam Formation - Delay

In practice, ideal delays are quantized, i.e.,
received signals are temporally sampled.
The sampling frequency for fine focusing
quality needs to be over 32*f0(>>
Nyquist).
Interpolation is essential in a digital system
and can be done in RF, IF or BB.

Beam Formation - Delay

RF beamformer requires either a clock
frequency well over 100MHz, or a large
number of real-time computations.
BB beamformer processes data at a low
clock frequency at the price of complex
signal processing.

Beam Formation - Delay

R x i sin x cos
(x i ,R , )

c
c
2R c
2
i

Beam Formation - RF
ADC

interpolation

x i2 cos2
n (t1 ) n (t2 ) 1
2
c

digital delay

1
t1

su m m atio n

element i

t2

Beam Formation - RF
Interpolation by 2:

Z-1
1/2

MUX

Z-1

Beam Formation - RF
General filtering architecture (interpolation by m):
Delay

Filter 2

MUX

Filter 1

FIFO
Coarse delay control

Filter m-1
Fine delay control

Beam Formation - BB
element i

ADC

demod/
LPF

time delay/
phase rotation

A (t ) j2f (t ) j2fd
B B (t )
e
e
2

The coarse time delay is applied at a low clock

frequency, the fine phase needs to be rotated accurately
(e.g., by CORDIC).

Beam Formation - Apodization

Aperture weighting is often simplified as a choice of
apodization type (such as uniform, Hamming,
Gaussian, ...etc.)
Apodization is used to control sidelobes, grating
lobes and depth of field.
Apodization generally can use lower number of bits.
Often used on transmit, but not on receive.

Range Dependence
Single channel (delay).
Single channel
(apodization).
Aperture growth (delay
and apodization).

1/R
R

Aperture Growth
Constant f-number for linear and sector
formats.
R

sector

linear

Use angular response for convex formats.

Aperture Growth
Use a threshold level (e.g., -6dB) of an
individual elements two-way response to
control the aperture growth for convex
arrays.
element response

sin

Aperture Growth

R cos r cos
tan

R sin r sin
1

Aperture Growth
Use the threshold angle to control lens
opening.
Channels far away from the center channel
contribute little to the coherent sum.
F-number vs. threshold angle.

Apodization Issues
Mainlobe vs. sidelobes (contrast vs. detail).
Sensitivity (particularly for Doppler modes).

Apodization Issues
Grating lobes (near field and undersampled apertures).
Clinical evaluation of grating lobe levels.

Apodization Issues
Near field resolution. Are more channels
better ?
Depth of field : 2* f-number2*using the /8
criterion).

Apodization Issues
Large depth of field - better image uniformity
for single focus systems.
Large depth of field - higher frame rate for
multiple focus systems.
Depth of field vs. beam spacing.

Synthetic Aperture Imaging

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

PA

SA

Phased array has all N2 combinations.

Synthetic aperture has only N diagonal
records.

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Conventional phased array: all effective
channels are excited to form a transmit
beam. All effective channels contribute to
receive beam forming.
Synthetic aperture: a large aperture is
synthesized by moving, or multiplexing a
small active aperture over a large array.

Applications in Medical Imaging

High frequency ultrasound: High
frequency (>20MHz) arrays are difficult
to construct.
Some applications:
Ophthalmology.
Dermatology.
Bio-microscopy.

Applications in Medical Imaging

catheter

imager

T/R

multiplexor

Intra-vascular ultrasound: Majority of the

imaging device needs to be integrated into a
balloon angioplasty device, the number of
connection is desired to be at a minimum.

Applications in Medical Imaging

Hand-held scanners: multi-element
synthetic aperture imaging can be used
for optimal tradeoff between cost and
image quality.
defocused beam
focused beam

scanning direction

Applications in Medical Imaging

Large 1D arrays: For example, a 256 channel
1D array can be driven by a 64 channel system.
1.5D and 2D arrays: Improve the image quality
without increasing the system channel number.

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

PA

SA

Phased array has all N2 combinations.

Synthetic aperture has only N diagonal
records.

Full Data Set

Transmit

Receive

Receive

Transmit

Phased Array

Synthetic Aperture

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Point spread function:
h( ) c0

k
Nd sin( ))
2
k
sin 2 ( d sin( ))
2

sin 2 (

weighting

sin( kNd sin( ))

h( ) c0
sin( kd sin( ))
weighting
aperture

aperture
d

2d

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Spatial and contrast resolution:

phased array

synthetic aperture

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Signal-to-noise ratio: SNR is determined
by the transmitted acoustic power and
receive electronic noise. Assuming the
same driving voltage, the SNR loss for
synthetic aperture is 1/N.

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Frame rate: Frame rate is determined by the
number of channels for synthetic aperture, it
is not directly affected by the spatial Nyquist
sampling criterion. Thus, there is a potential
increase compared to phased array.

c
frame rate
2 ND

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Motion artifacts: For synthetic aperture, a
frame cannot be formed until all data are
collected. Thus, any motion during data
acquisition may produce severe artifacts.
The motion artifacts may be corrected,
but it imposes further constraints on the
imaging scheme.

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Tissue harmonic imaging: Generation of
tissue harmonics is determined by its
nonlinearity and instantaneous acoustic
pressure. Synthetic aperture is not ideal
for such applications.

Synthetic Aperture vs. Phased Array

Speckle decorrelation: Based on van Cittert
Zernike theorem, signals from nonoverlapping apertures have no correlation.
Therefore, such synthetic apertures cannot
be used for correlation based processing
such as aberration correction, speckle
tracking and Doppler processing.

Filter Based Synthetic Focusing

Motivation
Conventional ultrasonic array imaging system
Fixed transmit and dynamic receive focusing
Image quality degradation at depths away from the
transmit focal zone

Dynamic transmit focusing

Fully realize the image quality achievable by an array
system
Not practical for real-time implementation

DynTx DynRx

beam pattern

FixedTx DynRx

Motivation

Retrospective filtering technique

Treat dynamic transmit focusing as a deconvolution
problem
Based on fixed transmit and dynamic receive focusing

Synthetic transmit and receive focusing

Based on fixed transmit and fixed receive focusing
System complexity is greatly reduced

Retrospective Filtering
( s bpoof ) (bpideal 1 bpoof ) s bpideal
original image inverse filter

focused image

Where s: scattering distribution function, bpoof: out of focused pulse-echo

beam pattern, bpideal: ideal pulse-echo beam pattern
all are a function of (R, sin)

Transducer

Signal Processing
Scan Conversion
Display

A/D

Image
Buffer

Beamformer

Baseband
Demodulation

Range-Dependent
Filter Bank

Beam
Buffer

Inverse filter

Spatial Fourier transform relationship

Beam pattern aperture function

The spectrum of the inverse/optimal filter is the ideal

pulse-echo effective aperture divided by the out-offocused pulse-echo aperture function
Robust deconvolution

No singular point in the passband of spectrum

SNR is sufficiently high

The number of taps equals to the number of beams

Not practical

Optimal filter
Less sensitive to noise than inverse filter
Filter length can be shorter
Convolution matrix form

y( mn 1*1) B( m n 1*n ) f ( n*1)

the mean squared error(MSE)

B f d B f d
H

Minimize MSE
1 H
opt
H
f B B B d ( B ) 1 d

where, b: the out-of-focused beam pattern, d: desired beam pattern

Pulse-echo effective apertures

The pulse-echo beam pattern is the multiplication of the transmit beam and the receive
beam
The pulse-echo effective aperture is the convolution of transmit and receive apertures

For C.W.

C ( x ) | C ( x ) | e

jkx
2

1 1

R
R0

DynTx DynRx

10

0.5
0
1

R=Ro

0.5

RRo

0
1
0.5
0

DynRx

5
0
10

FixedRx

5
0
10
5
0

Experimental Results
DynTx DynRx
a

FixedTx DynRx
b

b filtered

FixedTx FixedRx
d filtered
d
e

Experimental Results
0

DynTx DynRx
DynRx
DynRx Filtered
FixedRx Filtered

dB

-10

-20

-30

-40
-0.15

-0.1

-0.05

0
sin

0.05

0.1

0.15

Experimental Results
DynTx DynRx

FixedTx DynRx

FixedTx FixedRx

Homework Hint (Due 4/5 noon)

Transmit

Receive

Receive

Transmit

Synthetic Aperture

Phased Array
NT

NR

aPA ( R, ) W (iT , jR , R, )s (iT , jR , t ( R, , iT , jR ))

iT 1 j R 1

NT

aSA ( R, ) W (iT , iT , R, )s (iT , iT , t ( R, , iT , iT ))

iT 1