• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.534-544
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• 2022

Medical ultrasound system has been widely used to visualize the lesion for diagnostics in most medical service site including hospitals and clinics thanks to its advantages such as real time operation, ease of use, safety. Among many signal processing blocks of the system, one of the most important part that governs the image quality is the beamformer, and technologies for this part has been continuously developed in long time. The synthetic aperture imaging method, that is one of the major technologies of beamforming, was introduced to maximize utilizing the information delivered from the patient's body through the probe, and contributed to breakthrough of the image quality since it was introduced in around 1990's, and evolved continuously in decades. This paper reviews and surveys the process of development of this technology and expects future evolution.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.31-38
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• 2019

In this paper, we develop a beamforming front end platform with pipeline circuit configuration method that can apply various clinical diagnostic applications of ultrasound image technology. Hardware design targets compression applications as well as scalable applications where power, integration levels and replication possibilities are important. Firmware design was implemented to achieve optimal FPGA parallel processing level by constructing new IP and system-oriented design environment to accelerate design productivity with maximum productivity improvement using Vivado HLS tool, which is a next generation high level synthesis tool. Former supports the high-speed management function of scan data that can create an image area arbitrarily and can be appropriately corrected and supplemented when reconfiguring or changing system specifications in the future.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.803-810
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• 2007

Although synthetic aperture focusing techniques can improve the spatial resolution of ultrasound imaging, they have not been employed in a commercial product because they require a real-time N-channel beamformer with a tremendously increased hardware complexity for simultaneous beamforming along M multiple lines. In this paper, a hardware-efficient beamformer architecture for synthetic aperture focusing is presented. In contrast to the straightforward design using NM delay calculators, the proposed method utilizes only M delay calculators by sharing the same values among the focusing delays which should be calculated at the same time between the N channels for all imaging points along the M scan lines. In general, synthetic aperture beamforming requires M 2-port memories. In the proposed beamformer, the input data for each channel is first upsampled with a 4-fold interpolator and each polyphase component of the interpolator output is stored into a 2-port memory separately, requiring 4M 2-port memories for each channel. By properly limiting the area formed with the synthetic aperture focusing, the input memory buffer can be implemented with only 4 2-port memories and one short multi-port memory.