an-experimental-protocol-for-assessing-performance-new-ultrasound

An Experimental Protocol for Assessing the Performance of New Ultrasound Probes Based on CMUT Technology in Application to Brain Imaging

The possibility to perform an early and repeatable assessment of imaging performance is fundamental in the design and development process of new ...

Functionality, controllability and cosmetics are the key issues to be addressed in order to accomplish a successful functional substitution of the human hand by means of a prosthesis. Not only the prosthesis should duplicate the human hand in shape, functionality, sensorization, perception and sense of body-belonging, but it should also be controlled as the natural one, in the most intuitive and undemanding way. At present, prosthetic hands are controlled by means of non-invasive interfaces based on electromyography (EMG). Driving a multi degrees of freedom (DoF) hand for achieving hand dexterity implies to selectively modulate many different EMG signals in order to make each joint move independently, and this could require significant cognitive effort to the user.

Principal components analysis based control of a multi-DoF underactuated prosthetic hand.

Fetal Heart Rate (FHR) monitoring gives important information about the fetus health state during pregnancy. This paper presents a new prototype for remote fetal monitoring. The device will allow to monitor FHR in a domiciliary context and to send fetal ECG traces to a hospital facility, where clinicians can interpret them. In this way the mother could receive prompt feedback about fetal wellbeing. The system is characterized by two units: (i) a wearable unit endowed with textile electrodes for abdominal ECG recordings and with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board for fetal heart rate (FHR) extraction; (ii) a dock station for the transmission of the data through the telephone line. The system will allow to reduce costs in fetal monitoring, improving the assessment of fetal conditions. The device is actually in development state. In this paper, the most crucial aspects behind its fulfillment are discussed.

Prototype of a wearable system for remote fetal monitoring during pregnancy.

Nowadays, ultrasound diagnostic imaging is one of the non-invasive techniques mostly used in the clinical practice. Recent advances in this field have brought to the development of small and portable systems. New bidimensional probes consisting of 2D phased arrays, allow to obtain real-time 3D representations of moving organs and blood vessels anatomy. Being the complexity of such 4D ultrasound imaging systems significantly increased, new challenges concerning electronics integration arise for designers. In this paper a software simulator is described, which has been developed in order to model ultrasound wave generation, pressure field distribution and echoes reception, with the aim to become a useful tool for optimizing the probe design. The paper mainly focuses on linear ultrasound field modeling; preliminary results on non-linear interactions with contrast agents are also here introduced.

Simulating ultrasound fields for 2D phased-array probes design optimization.

In spite of the advances made in the design of dexterous anthropomorphic hand prostheses, these sophisticated devices still lack adequate control interfaces which could allow amputees to operate them in an intuitive and close-to-natural way. In this study, an anthropomorphic five-fingered robotic hand, actuated by six motors, was used as a prosthetic hand emulator to assess the feasibility of a control approach based on Principal Components Analysis (PCA), specifically conceived to address this problem. Since it was demonstrated elsewhere that the first two principal components (PCs) can describe the whole hand configuration space sufficiently well, the controller here employed reverted the PCA algorithm and allowed to drive a multi-DoF hand by combining a two-differential channels EMG input with these two PCs. Hence, the novelty of this approach stood in the PCA application for solving the challenging problem of best mapping the EMG inputs into the degrees of freedom (DoFs) of the prosthesis.

Real-time myoelectric control of a multi-fingered hand prosthesis using principal components analysis.

In modern ultrasound imaging devices, two-dimensional probes and electronic scanning allow volumetric imaging of anatomical structures. When dealing with the design of such complex 3-D ultrasound (US) systems, as the number of transducers and channels dramatically increases, new challenges concerning the integration of electronics and the implementation of smart micro-beamforming strategies arise. Hence, the possibility to predict the behavior of the whole system is mandatory. In this paper, we propose and describe an advanced simulation tool for ultrasound system modeling and simulation, which conjugates the US propagation and scattering, signal transduction, electronic signal conditioning, and beamforming in a single environment. In particular, we present the architecture and model of an existing 16-channel integrated receiver, which includes an amplification and micro-beamforming stage, and validate it by comparison with circuit simulations. The developed model is then used in conjunction with the transducer and US field models to perform a system simulation, aimed at estimating the performance of an example 3-D US imaging system that uses a capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) 2-D phased-array coupled to the modeled reception front-end. Results of point spread function (PSF) calculations, as well as synthetic imaging of a virtual phantom, show that this tool is actually able to model the complete US image reconstruction process, and that it could be used to quickly provide valuable system-level feedback for an optimized tuning of electronic design parameters.

A volumetric CMUT-based ultrasound imaging system simulator with integrated reception and μ-beamforming electronics models.

Most of ultrasound medical imaging systems currently on the market implement standard Delay and Sum (DAS) beamforming to form B-mode images. However, image resolution and contrast achievable with DAS are limited by the aperture size and by the operating frequency. For this reason, different beamformers have been presented in the literature that are mainly based on adaptive algorithms, which allow achieving higher performance at the cost of an increased computational complexity. In this paper, we propose the use of an alternative nonlinear beamforming algorithm for medical ultrasound imaging, which is called Delay Multiply and Sum (DMAS) and that was originally conceived for a RADAR microwave system for breast cancer detection. We modify the DMAS beamformer and test its performance on both simulated and experimentally collected linear-scan data, by comparing the Point Spread Functions, beampatterns, synthetic phantom and in vivo carotid artery images obtained with standard DAS and with the proposed algorithm. Results show that the DMAS beamformer outperforms DAS in both simulated and experimental trials and that the main improvement brought about by this new method is a significantly higher contrast resolution (i.e., narrower main lobe and lower side lobes), which turns out into an increased dynamic range and better quality of B-mode images.

The delay multiply and sum beamforming algorithm in ultrasound B-mode medical imaging.

The Delay Multiply and Sum (DMAS) beamforming algorithm was originally conceived for microwave imaging of breast cancer. In a previous work, we demonstrated that, by properly modifying and improving the algorithm processing steps, DMAS can be successfully applied to ultrasound signals for B-mode image formation and that it outperforms standard Delay and Sum (DAS) beamforming in terms of contrast resolution. As previously pointed out, however, DMAS-beamformed B-mode images, in which fixed and dynamic focusing are applied respectively during transmit and receive operations, show an intensity drop away from the transmit focal depth compared to DAS images. This could be due to the fact that DMAS beamforming is based on a measure of backscattered signal coherence, which reaches its maximum only at the transmit focus, where signals are perfectly realigned. The preliminary results presented in this work show that, by employing Synthetic Aperture Focusing (SAF), which allows to achieve dynamic focusing both on transmission and reception, this intensity loss is compensated, as DAS and DMAS images have almost the same maximum amplitude level at all depths.

Ultrasound Synthetic Aperture Focusing with the Delay Multiply and sum beamforming algorithm.

Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) represent an effective alternative to piezoelectric transducers for medical ultrasound imaging applications. They are microelectromechanical devices fabricated using silicon micromachining techniques, developed in the last two decades in many laboratories. The interest for this novel transducer technology relies on its full compatibility with standard integrated circuit technology that makes it possible to integrate on the same chip the transducers and the electronics, thus enabling the realization of extremely low-cost and high-performance devices, including both 1-D or 2-D arrays. Being capacitive transducers, CMUTs require a high bias voltage to be properly operated in pulse-echo imaging applications. The typical bias supply residual ripple of high-quality high-voltage (HV) generators is in the millivolt range, which is comparable with the amplitude of the received echo signals, and it is particularly difficult to minimize. The aim of this paper is to analyze the classical CMUT biasing circuits, highlighting the features of each one, and to propose two novel HV generator architectures optimized for CMUT biasing applications. The first circuit proposed is an ultralow-residual ripple (<5 [Formula: see text]) HV generator that uses an extremely stable sinusoidal power oscillator topology. The second circuit employs a commercially available integrated step-up converter characterized by a particularly efficient switching topology. The circuit is used to bias the CMUT by charging a buffer capacitor synchronously with the pulsing sequence, thus reducing the impact of the switching noise on the received echo signals. The small area of the circuit (about 1.5 cm(2)) makes it possible to generate the bias voltage inside the probe, very close to the CMUT, making the proposed solution attractive for portable applications. Measurements and experiments are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approaches presented.

Biasing of Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers.

The Synthetic Aperture Focusing (SAF) technique makes it possible to achieve a higher and more uniform quality of ultrasound images throughout depth, as if both transmit and receive dynamic focusing were applied. In this work we combine a particular implementation of SAF, called Synthetic Transmit Aperture (STA) technique, in which a single element in turn transmits and all the array elements receive the ultrasound wave, with the Filtered-Delay Multiply and Sum (F-DMAS) non-linear beamforming algorithm that we presented in a previous paper. We show that using F-DMAS, which is based on a measure of backscattered signal spatial correlation, B-mode images have a higher contrast resolution but suffer from a loss of brightness away from the transmit focus, when a classical scan with receive-only dynamic focusing is performed. On the other hand, when synthetic transmit focusing is achieved by implementing STA, such a loss is compensated for and a higher depth of field is obtained, as signal coherence improves. A drawback of SAF/STA however is the reduced signal-to-noise ratio, due to single-element transmission; in the paper we also analyze how this influences F-DMAS images. Finally, a preliminary investigation on the use of the classical monostatic SAF technique with F-DMAS beamforming is also carried out to evaluate its potential performances.

Depth-of-field enhancement in Filtered-Delay Multiply and Sum beamformed images using Synthetic Aperture Focusing.

Multi-Line Transmission (MLT) was recently demonstrated as a valuable tool to increase the frame rate of ultrasound images. In this approach, the multiple beams that are simultaneously transmitted may determine cross-talk artifacts that are typically reduced, although not eliminated, by the use of Tukey apodization on both transmission and reception apertures, which unfortunately worsens the image lateral resolution. In this paper we investigate the combination, and related performance, of Filtered-Delay Multiply And Sum (F-DMAS) beamforming with MLT for high frame-rate ultrasound imaging. F-DMAS is a non-linear beamformer based on the computation of the receive aperture spatial autocorrelation, which was recently proposed for use in ultrasound B-mode imaging by some of the authors. The main advantages of such beamformer are the improved contrast resolution, obtained by lowering the beam side lobes and narrowing the main lobe, and the increased noise rejection. This study shows that in MLT images, compared to standard Delay And Sum (DAS) beamforming including Tukey apodization, F-DMAS beamforming yields better suppression of cross-talk and improved lateral resolution. The method's effectiveness is demonstrated by simulations and phantom experiments. Preliminary in vivo cardiac images also show that the frame rate can be improved up to 8-fold by combining F-DMAS and MLT without affecting the image quality.

High Frame-Rate, High Resolution Ultrasound Imaging With Multi-Line Transmission and Filtered-Delay Multiply And Sum Beamforming.

Improving the frame rate is an important aspect in medical ultrasound imaging, particularly in 3D/4D cardiac applications. However, an accurate trade-off between the higher frame rate and image contrast and resolution should be performed. Plane-Wave Imaging (PWI) can potentially achieve frame rates in the order of 10 kHz, as it uses a single unfocused plane wave (and thus a single transmit event) to acquire the image of the entire region of interest. The lack of transmit focusing however causes a significant drop of image quality, which can be restored by coherently compounding several tilted plane-wave frames, at the expense of the frame rate. PWI together with the use of a beamforming algorithm able to achieve a higher image contrast resolution, such as the Delay Multiply And Sum (DMAS), could thus allow to improve image quality achieving a high frame rate at the same time. This paper presents the first simulation results obtained by employing DMAS beamforming and PWI with different transmission angles and coherent compounding. The simulated Point Spread Function (PSF) and cyst-phantom images show that DMAS makes it possible to achieve a high image quality with a reduced number of compounded frames compared to standard Delay And Sum (DAS), and hence it can be used to improve the contrast and resolution of plane-wave images still achieving a very high frame rate.

Article	Year
Principal components analysis based control of a multi-DoF underactuated prosthetic hand. Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation\| PubMed ID: 20416036	2010
Prototype of a wearable system for remote fetal monitoring during pregnancy. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual Conference\| PubMed ID: 21096913	2010
Simulating ultrasound fields for 2D phased-array probes design optimization. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual Conference\| PubMed ID: 22256323	2011
Real-time myoelectric control of a multi-fingered hand prosthesis using principal components analysis. Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation\| PubMed ID: 22703711	2012
A volumetric CMUT-based ultrasound imaging system simulator with integrated reception and μ-beamforming electronics models. IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control\| PubMed ID: 24803235	2014
The delay multiply and sum beamforming algorithm in ultrasound B-mode medical imaging. IEEE transactions on medical imaging\| PubMed ID: 25420256	2015
Ultrasound Synthetic Aperture Focusing with the Delay Multiply and sum beamforming algorithm. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual Conference\| PubMed ID: 26736219	2015
Biasing of Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers. IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control\| PubMed ID: 27810808	2017
Depth-of-field enhancement in Filtered-Delay Multiply and Sum beamformed images using Synthetic Aperture Focusing. Ultrasonics\| PubMed ID: 28011340	2017
High Frame-Rate, High Resolution Ultrasound Imaging With Multi-Line Transmission and Filtered-Delay Multiply And Sum Beamforming. IEEE transactions on medical imaging\| PubMed ID: 28113492	2017
Ultrasound plane-wave imaging with delay multiply and sum beamforming and coherent compounding. Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual Conference\| PubMed ID: 28268994	2016

Giulia Matrone

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