This thesis presents the design of a high-frequency annular array ultrasound system suitable for medical imaging. To reduce the cost of the system, off-the-shelf parts were used whenever possible. The system consists of four main components; 1) a transmit beamformer, 2) a high voltage pulse generator, 3) an annular array transducer and 4) a receive beamformer. The transmit beamformer and pulser were designed for an 8-channel array but could be easily expanded for larger arrays. The pulser produces monocycle electrical pulses with centre frequencies that could be adjusted from 10-50 MHz and with amplitudes up to 90 Vpp. The annular array transducer has 12 equal area elements and a total active aperture of 6 mm. The transducer array produced pulses with a centre frequency of 20 MHz and 50% bandwidth. The resulting images had a lateral resolution of 172.5 μm at 10 mm and an axial resolution of 180 μm. A new fabrication method was developed that makes it easier to build the array. The receive beamformer was based on a commercial 8-channel analog-to-digital converter. The digital signals were transferred to a laptop where the beamforming was performed in software. This avoided the need to develop custom hardware and allowed it to be reconfigured for different transducers by simply modifying the software. The beamformer used a new interpolation method that reduced the required sampling frequency while maintaining a satisfactory radiation pattern. The system produces images at 10 frames/sec. / Thesis (Ph.D, Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy) -- Queen's University, 2011-05-06 13:15:34.495

Ultrasound imaging is a ubiquitous part of the modern medical diagnostics toolbox. It has widespread applications to many areas of medicine, including angiology, cardiology, nephrology, urology, and obstetrics. It is often preferred over other imaging modalities, such as x-ray computed tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) because it is non-invasive, non-ionizing, inexpensive, and has excellent penetration depth in the body. The design, optimization, and manufacturing of ultrasound transducers used in ultrasound imaging is a challenging engineering problem. Faced with a variety of different imaging environments, ultrasound transducers must often be optimized for performance in very specific applications. This is especially true for catheter-based solutions, such as intracardiac and intravascular ultrasound, where imaging performance is strongly dependent on the strength of backscatter from tissue due to significant limitations in device size, electronics, and signal-to-noise ratio. Currently, there is a need for the accurate and fast simulation of the imaging process used in ultrasound imaging, including the ability to capture the effects of backscatter from a variety of different tissues. This thesis discusses the development of simulation tools for the quantitative simulation of tissue backscatter and blood motion from acoustic fields coupled to spatial array transducers, based on an application of the Rayleigh speckle model to the linear systems model for acoustic diffraction from spatial array transducers. These simulation tools have potential applications in the field of medical ultrasonics, with particular attention to the areas of transducer design and optimization, beamforming and array processing, and image reconstruction. We demonstrate how the simulation tools developed here can be used to characterize array imaging performance and to investigate reconstruction performance of common flow algorithms for Doppler ultrasound imaging.

Doppler ultrasound imaging modalities arguably represent one of the most complex task performed (usually in real time) by ultrasound scanners. At the heart of these techniques lies the ability to detect and estimate soft tissues or blood motion within the human body. As they have become an invaluable tool in a wide range of clinical applications, these techniques have fostered an intensive effort of research in the field of signal processing for more than thirty years, with a push towards more accurate velocity or displacement estimation. Coded excitation has recently received a growing interest in the medical ultrasound community. The use of these techniques, originally developed in the radar field, makes it possible to increase the depth of penetration in B-mode imaging, while complying with safety standards. These standards impose strict limits on the peak acoustic intensity which can be transmitted into the body. Similar solutions were proposed in the early developments of Doppler flow-meters to improve the resolution / sensitivity trade-off from which typical pulsed Doppler systems suffer. This work discusses the potential improvements in resolution, sensitivity and accuracy achievable in the context of modern Doppler ultrasound imaging modalities (taken in its broadest sense, that is, all the techniques involving the estimation of displacements, or velocities). A theoretical framework is provided for discussing this potential improvements, along with simulations for a more quantitative assessment. Colour Flow Imaging (CFI) modalities are taken as the main reference technique for discussion, due to their historical importance, and their relevance in many clinical applications. The potential achievable improvement in accuracy is studied in the context of modern velocity estimation strategies, which can be broadly classified into narrowband estimators (such as the “Kasai” estimator still widely used in CFI) and time shift based wideband strategies (normalised crosscorrelation estimator used, for instance, in applications like strain or strain rate estimation, elastography, etc.). Finally, simulations and theoretical results are compared to experimental data obtained with a simple custom-designed experimental set-up, using a single-element transducer.

abstract: Medical ultrasound imaging is widely used today because of it being non-invasive and cost-effective. Flow estimation helps in accurate diagnosis of vascular diseases and adds an important dimension to medical ultrasound imaging. Traditionally flow estimation is done using Doppler-based methods which only estimate velocity in the beam direction. Thus when blood vessels are close to being orthogonal to the beam direction, there are large errors in the estimation results. In this dissertation, a low cost blood flow estimation method that does not have the angle dependency of Doppler-based methods, is presented. First, a velocity estimator based on speckle tracking and synthetic lateral phase is proposed for clutter-free blood flow. Speckle tracking is based on kernel matching and does not have any angle dependency. While velocity estimation in axial dimension is accurate, lateral velocity estimation is challenging due to reduced resolution and lack of phase information. This work presents a two tiered method which estimates the pixel level movement using sum-of-absolute difference, and then estimates the sub-pixel level using synthetic phase information in the lateral dimension. Such a method achieves highly accurate velocity estimation with reduced complexity compared to a cross correlation based method. The average bias of the proposed estimation method is less than 2% for plug flow and less than 7% for parabolic flow. Blood is always accompanied by clutter which originates from vessel wall and surrounding tissues. As magnitude of the blood signal is usually 40-60 dB lower than magnitude of the clutter signal, clutter filtering is necessary before blood flow estimation. Clutter filters utilize the high magnitude and low frequency features of clutter signal to effectively remove them from the compound (blood + clutter) signal. Instead of low complexity FIR filter or high complexity SVD-based filters, here a power/subspace iteration based method is proposed for clutter filtering. Excellent clutter filtering performance is achieved for both slow and fast moving clutters with lower complexity compared to SVD-based filters. For instance, use of the proposed method results in the bias being less than 8% and standard deviation being less than 12% for fast moving clutter when the beam-to-flow-angle is $90^o$. Third, a flow rate estimation method based on kernel power weighting is proposed. As the velocity estimator is a kernel-based method, the estimation accuracy degrades near the vessel boundary. In order to account for kernels that are not fully inside the vessel, fractional weights are given to these kernels based on their signal power. The proposed method achieves excellent flow rate estimation results with less than 8% bias for both slow and fast moving clutters. The performance of the velocity estimator is also evaluated for challenging models. A 2D version of our two-tiered method is able to accurately estimate velocity vectors in a spinning disk as well as in a carotid bifurcation model, both of which are part of the synthetic aperture vector flow imaging (SA-VFI) challenge of 2018. In fact, the proposed method ranked 3rd in the challenge for testing dataset with carotid bifurcation. The flow estimation method is also evaluated for blood flow in vessels with stenosis. Simulation results show that the proposed method is able to estimate the flow rate with less than 9% bias. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2018

abstract: Ultrasound imaging is one of the major medical imaging modalities. It is cheap, non-invasive and has low power consumption. Doppler processing is an important part of many ultrasound imaging systems. It is used to provide blood velocity information and is built on top of B-mode systems. We investigate the performance of two velocity estimation schemes used in Doppler processing systems, namely, directional velocity estimation (DVE) and conventional velocity estimation (CVE). We find that DVE provides better estimation performance and is the only functioning method when the beam to flow angle is large. Unfortunately, DVE is computationally expensive and also requires divisions and square root operations that are hard to implement. We propose two approximation techniques to replace these computations. The simulation results on cyst images show that the proposed approximations do not affect the estimation performance. We also study backend processing which includes envelope detection, log compression and scan conversion. Three different envelope detection methods are compared. Among them, FIR based Hilbert Transform is considered the best choice when phase information is not needed, while quadrature demodulation is a better choice if phase information is necessary. Bilinear and Gaussian interpolation are considered for scan conversion. Through simulations of a cyst image, we show that bilinear interpolation provides comparable contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) performance with Gaussian interpolation and has lower computational complexity. Thus, bilinear interpolation is chosen for our system. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Electrical Engineering 2013

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第21218号 / 情博第671号 / 新制||情||116(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科通信情報システム専攻 / (主査)教授 佐藤 亨, 教授 山本 衛, 教授 松田 哲也 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Evolution of vulnerable carotid plaques are crucial reason for cerebral ischemic strokes and identifying them in the early stage can become very important in avoiding the risk of stroke. In order to improve the identification and quantification accuracy of infancy plaques better visualization techniques are needed. Improving the visualization and quantification of neovascularization in carotid plaque using contrast enhanced ultrasound imaging still remains a challenging task. In this thesis work, three optimization techniques are proposed, which showed an improvement in the sensitivity of contrast agents when compared to the conventional clinical settings and insonation strategies. They are as follows:1) Insonation at harmonic specific (2nd harmonic) resonance frequency instead of resonance frequency based on maximum energy absorption provides enhanced nonlinear contribution.2) At high frequency ultrasound imaging, shorter pulse length will provide improved harmonic signal content when compared to longer pulse lengths. Applying this concept to multi- pulse sequencing (Pulse Inversion and Cadence contrast pulse sequencing) resulted in increased magnitude of the remaining harmonic signal after pulse summations.3) Peak negative pressure optimization of Pulse Inversion and Cadence contrast pulse sequencing was showed to further enhance the nonlinear content of the backscattered signal from contrast microbubbles without increasing the safety limits, defined by the mechanical index.The results presented in this thesis are based on computational modeling (Bubblesim software) and as a future continuation we plan to verify the simulation results with vitro studies.

Ce travail de thèse a pour objectif de développer et de valider expérimentalement un modèle de diffusion adapté au sang agrégeant, prenant en compte une forte fraction volumique de globules rouges (hématocrite de 40%) et des structures d’agrégats polydisperses. Un modèle développé récemment pour l’estimation de la microstructure du sang est la théorie de milieu effectif combinée à un modèle de facteur de structure monodisperse. Pour augmenter le domaine de validité de ce modèle en hautes fréquences, nous proposons une théorie de milieu effectif prenant en compte la composante incohérente de la diffusion par des agrégats de globules rouges. A l’aide de simulation numériques tridimensionnelles, nous montrons que la nouvelle modélisation permet de prédire les coefficients de rétrodiffusion de façon satisfaisante pour un produit $kR<2$ ($k$ étant le nombre d’ondes et $R$ le rayon d’un agrégat). Par ailleurs, nous proposons une théorie de milieu effectif combinée à un facteur de structure polydisperse afin d’estimer, à partir de la mesure expérimentale du coefficient de rétrodiffusion, des paramètres de structure des agrégats : le rayon moyen de la distribution de tailles, son étalement, et la compacité des agrégats. Des expériences réalisées sur du sang de porc cisaillé dans un dispositif de Couette couplé à une sonde ultrasonore montrent que le modèle polydisperse permet d’obtenir de meilleures courbes d’ajustement des coefficients de rétrodiffusion en comparaison des modèles monodisperses classiques. Les tailles d’agrégats estimées par ultrasons sont corrélées de façon satisfaisante (r$^2$ $\approx$ 0.92) avec les tailles estimées par ailleurs dans un dispositif optique. / This thesis aims to develop and evaluate a scattering model for aggregating blood, taking into account the high volume fraction of red blood cells in blood (40%) and the polydispersity in terms of aggregate size. The effective medium theory combined with the monodisperse structure factor model was recently developed to estimate blood microstructure. In order to improve the modeling at high frequency range, we proposed an effective medium theory that takes into account the incoherent component of the scattering by aggregates of RBCs. Three dimensional simulations were performed and showed that the consideration of the incoherent component allows to approximate the simulation satisfactorily for a product of the wavenumber times the aggregates radius $kR$ up to 2. Besides, we proposed an effective medium theory combined with a polydisperse structure factor. From the measured BSC, this model allows to estimate three structural parameters: the mean radius of the aggregate size distribution, the width of the distribution, and the compactness of the aggregates. Experiments were performed on pig blood shared in a Couette device coupled with an ultrasonic probe, and showed that the polydisperse modeling provides better fitting to the experimental BSC data, when compared to the classical monodisperse models. Satisfactory correlation is obtained (r$^2$ $\approx$ 0.92) between the aggregate sizes estimated with ultrasound and the aggregate sizes estimated on the same sample in an optical device.

L'échographie est largement utilisée pour l'imagerie du flux sanguin pour ses nombreux avantages tels que son inocuité, son cout réduit, sa facilité d'utilisation et ses performances. Cette thèse a pour objectif de proposer de nouvelles méthodes ultrasonores d'imagerie du flux sanguin. Après une étude bibliographique, plusieurs approches ont été étudiées en détail jusqu'à leur implémentation sur l'échographe de recherche ULA-OP développé au sein du laboratoire et ont été validées en laboratoire et en clinique. La transmission d'ondes planes a été proposée pour améliorer la technique d'imagerie utilisant les oscillations transverses. Des champs de pression ultrasonores présentant des oscillations transverses sont générés dans de larges régions et exploités pour l'estimation vectorielle du flux sanguin à une haute cadence d'imagerie. Des cartes du flux sanguin sont obtenues grâce à une technique s'appuyant sur la transmission d'ondes planes couplées à un nouvel algorithme d'estimation de la vitesse dans le domaine fréquentiel. Les méthodes vectorielles implémentées en temps réel dans le ULA-OP ont été comparées à la méthode Doppler classique lors d'une étude clinique. Les résultats ont montré le bénéfice des méthodes vectorielles en termes de précision et de répétabilité. La nouvelle méthode proposée a démontré sa grande précision ainsi que son gain en termes de temps de calcul aussi bien en simulations qu'en acquisitions en laboratoire ou lors d'essais in vivo. Une solution logicielle temps réel implémentée sur une carte GPU a été proposée et testée afin de réduire encore le temps de calcul et permettre l'emploi de la méthode en clinique / Ultrasound is widely used for blood flow imaging because of the considerable advantages for the clinician, in terms of performance, costs, portability, and ease of use, and for the patient, in terms of safety and rapid checkup. The undesired limitations of conventional methods (1-D estimations and low frame-rate) are widely overtaken by new vector approaches that offer detailed descriptions of the flow for a more accurate diagnosis of cardiovascular system diseases. This PhD project concerns the development of novel methods for blood flow imaging. After studying the state-of-the-art in the field, a few approaches have been examined in depth up to their experimental validation, both in technical and clinical environments, on a powerful ultrasound research platform (ULA-OP). Real-time novel vector methods implemented on ULA-OP were compared to standard Doppler methods in a clinical study. The results attest the benefits of the vector methods in terms of accuracy and repeatability. Plane-wave transmissions were exploited to improve the transverse oscillation imaging method. Double oscillating fields were produced in large regions and exploited for the vectorial description of blood flow at high frame rates. Blood flow maps were obtained by plane waves coupled to a novel velocity estimation algorithm operating in the frequency domain. The new method was demonstrated capable of high accuracy and reduced computational load by simulations and experiments (also in vivo). The investigation of blood flow inside the common carotid artery has revealed the hemodynamic details with unprecedented quality. A software solution implemented on a graphic processing unit (GPU) board was suggested and tested to reduce the computational time and support the clinical employment of the method

Spectroscopic techniques allow for studies of materials and organisms on the atomic and molecular level. Examples of such techniques are nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy—one of the principal techniques to obtain physical, chemical, electronic and structural information about molecules—and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—an important medical imaging technique for, e.g., visualization of the internal structure of the human body. The less well-known spectroscopic technique of nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) is related to NMR and MRI but with the difference that no external magnetic field is needed. NQR has found applications in, e.g., detection of explosives and narcotics. The first part of this thesis is focused on detection and identification of solid and liquid explosives using both NQR and NMR data. Methods allowing for uncertainties in the assumed signal amplitudes are proposed, as well as methods for estimation of model parameters that allow for non-uniform sampling of the data. The second part treats two medical applications. Firstly, new, fast methods for parameter estimation in MRI data are presented. MRI can be used for, e.g., the diagnosis of anomalies in the skin or in the brain. The presented methods allow for a significant decrease in computational complexity without loss in performance. Secondly, the estimation of blood flow velo-city using medical ultrasound scanners is addressed. Information about anomalies in the blood flow dynamics is an important tool for the diagnosis of, for example, stenosis and atherosclerosis. The presented methods make no assumption on the sampling schemes, allowing for duplex mode transmissions where B-mode images are interleaved with the Doppler emissions.