Digital beamforming techniques and VLSI circuits for medical ultrasound imaging

For phased array medical ultrasound imaging, digital beamforming techniques and VLSI circuits are studied to form a fully digital receive front-end hardware. To increase the timing accuracy in beamforming, a computationally efficient upsampling schme is examined. A digital beamforming method based on receive focusing at the raster focal points is proposed. The sector images of the resolution phantom, reconstructed from the phased array experimental data by beamforming at the radial and raster focal points, are presented for comparison of the image resolution performance of the two beamforming schemes. For adaptive beamforming, a phase aberration correction technique with very low computational complexity is described. Image quality performance of the technique is examined by digitally processing the non-aberrated and aberrated phased array experimental data sets of an ultrasound resolution phantom. VLSI circuits and their implementations for the proposed techniques are presented.