Coding Mask Design for Single Sensor Ultrasound Imaging

Coding Mask Design for Single Sensor Ultrasound Imaging

van der Meulen, P.Q. (TU Delft Signal Processing Systems)
Kruizinga, P. (Erasmus MC)
Bosch, Johannes G. (Erasmus MC)
Leus, G.J.T. (TU Delft Signal Processing Systems)

2020

We study the design of a coding mask for pulse-echo ultrasound imaging. We are interested in the scenario of a single receiving transducer with an aberrating layer, or ‘mask,’ in front of the transducer's receive surface, with a separate co-located transmit transducer. The mask encodes spatial measurements into a single output signal, containing more information about a reflector's position than a transducer without a mask. The amount of information in such measurements is dependent on the mask geometry, which we propose to optimize using an image reconstruction mean square error (MSE) criterion. We approximate the physics involved to define a linear measurement model, which we use to find an expression for the image error covariance matrix. By discretizing the mask surface and defining a discrete number of mask thickness levels per point on its surface, we show how finding the best mask can be posed as a variation of a sensor selection problem. We propose a convex relaxation in combination with randomized rounding, as well as a greedy optimization algorithm to solve this problem. We show empirically that both algorithms come close to the global optimum. Our simulations further show that the optimized masks have better a MSE than nearly all randomly shaped masks. We observe that an optimized mask amplifies echoes coming from within the region of interest (ROI), and strongly reduces the correlation between echoes of pixels within the ROI.

Coded aperture
compressed sensing
experimental design
sparse sensing
ultrasound imaging

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ba1a3ebd-999c-4566-91e5-ec74fa042956

https://doi.org/10.1109/TCI.2019.2948729

2020-04-21

2333-9403

IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, 6, 358-373

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2020 P.Q. van der Meulen, P. Kruizinga, Johannes G. Bosch, G.J.T. Leus