Adaptive ultrasound beamforming using deep learning

Ben Luijten, Regev Cohen, Frederik J. de Bruijn, Harold A.W. Schmeitz, Massimo Mischi, Yonina C. Eldar, Ruud J. G. van Sloun

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

128 Citations (Scopus)
284 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Biomedical imaging is unequivocally dependent on the ability to reconstruct interpretable and high-quality images from acquired sensor data. This reconstruction process is pivotal across many applications, spanning from magnetic resonance imaging to ultrasound imaging. While advanced data-adaptive reconstruction methods can recover much higher image quality than traditional approaches, their implementation often poses a high computational burden. In ultrasound imaging, this burden is significant, especially when striving for low-cost systems, and has motivated the development of high-resolution and high-contrast adaptive beamforming methods. Here we show that deep neural networks that adopt the algorithmic structure and constraints of adaptive signal processing techniques can efficiently learn to perform fast high-quality ultrasound beamforming using very little training data. We apply our technique to two distinct ultrasound acquisition strategies (plane wave, and synthetic aperture), and demonstrate that high image quality can be maintained when measuring at low data-rates, using undersampled array designs. Beyond biomedical imaging, we expect that the proposed deep~learning based adaptive processing framework can benefit a variety of array and signal processing applications, in particular when data-efficiency and robustness are of importance.
Original languageEnglish
Article number9138451
Pages (from-to)3967-3978
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Volume39
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2020

Keywords

  • Ultrasound
  • Adaptive Beamforming
  • Deep Learning

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