• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.85-92
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• 1984

A new architecture of the Digital Scan Converter (DSC) for the linear-scan ultrasound medical imaging systems is proposed and its hardware implementation is reported. While the conventional DSC merely displays the acquisited data and does nor allow access to the frame memory, it is possible, in the new system, to access to the frame memory for further imaging processing so as to obtain useful information for medical diagnosis. Image processing can be performed either by a special pupose processor, or by VAX 11/780. The system is made to operate asyncronously to increase the frame rate with tags assigned to the data. The proposed DSC was designed to be used without much modification for the sector scan system as well.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.419-431
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• 2000

In this paper, a new beamforming technique is proposed, which can completely eliminate all the artifacts caused by digital scan converter. In the proposed method, named display-pixel-based focusing(DPBF) by the authors, ultrasound waves are focused directly at the display pixels instead of sampling points on the polar coordinate. Consequently. the DPBF system does not require the digital scan converter. To verify the proposed method, we modified a commercial scanner and performed experiments with a 3.5 MHz convex array and a 7.5 MHz linear array. We also defined and measured ICRA/B(Image Coarseness Ratio) to compare the image quality quantitatively. The experimental results with in vivo and in vitro data show that the proposed method improves the ICRA/B considerably, resulting in much smoother and finer images.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.133-138
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• 1986

Abstract In a conventional digital sector scan system in the ultrasound medical imaging, the sampling space is in the polar coordinates while the display space is in the cartesian coordinates, which necessitates a coordinate transformation process resultion process resulting the overall system very complex and bulky. In this paper we propose a new architecture of the Digital-Scan-Converter (DSC) for the ultrasound sector scan system in which sampling space is the same as the display space, so the data are displayed as they are acquired without any interpola- tion process required. To implement the above real time DSC. two frequency synthesizes with very high switching time and a low-pass filter are required. The former determines the precise location of the data points and the latter fills the gap betw- een pixels in the horizontal direction.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.469-478
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• 1996

In the conventional digital ultrasound scanner, the reflected signal is sampled either in polar coordinates of R-$\theta$ method, or in Cartesian coordinates of uniform ladder algorithm (ULA). The R-$\theta$ scan method necessitates a coordinate transform process which makes hardware complex in comparison with ULA scan mrthoA In spite of this complexity, R-$\theta$ method has a good resolution in ultrasonographic (US) image, since scan direction of the US imaging is a radial direction. In this paper, a new digital scan converter is proposed, which is named the radius uniform ladder algorithm (RULA). The RULA has the rome scan direction as the US scanning in the radial direction and as the display space in the $\theta$ direction. In tllis new approach, sampled points we uniformly distributed in each horizontal line i.n well as in each radial ray so that the data are displayed in the Cartesian coordinates by the 1-D interpolation process. The propped algorithm has an uniform resolution in the periphery and the center field in comparison with equi-angle ULA and equi-interval ULA. To extend the scan angle, concentric square raster sampling (CSRS) is adopted with reduction of discontinuities on the junctions between horizontal scan and vertical scan. The discontinuities are reduced by using the hmction filtering along the $\theta$ direction.