Synthetic Receive Aperture Ultrasound Imaging Front-end System Design And Implementation

The synthetic aperture focus sound imaging was developed since 1970'. Synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) is the classical synthetic aperture method , where each time only a single element is used for transmission and reception. But the imaging reconstructive process takes too long to be applied in practical applications such as medical nondestructive testing. In order to increase frame rate and lateral resolution and reduce the cost and complexity of the imaging systems, Synthetic Receive Aperture (SRA) imaging was proposed.In this project, we designed digitized front-end and digital beamformer based on the study of real time SRA imaging system. A prototype of digital B-mode ultrasound SRA imaging system has been implemented successfully.The real time SRA imaging front-end system including hardware and software design was described in this paper. In order not to decrease the frame rate, the receive aperture was divided two receive subaperture. We have constructed a digital beam former by utilizing FPGA to realize the dynamic focusing and dynamic apodization. This paper presents the experiment results obtained from the SRA system.The experiment result shows that the system can improve the lateral resolution and the framerate is accepted in real time imaging system. The application of this system can not be under-estimated.