Design, Simulation and Analysis of a Matlab/Simulink Based Delay-and-Sum Beamforming Model for Ultrasound Imaging

EasyChair Preprint 9165

Abstract

In ultrasound research, an important subject is the quality of image assessment. Despite a myriad of technological solutions, qualitative and quantitative metrics are critical indicators to measure and compare the quality of ultrasound images. This paper presents a simulation of a model that implements step-by-step an image reconstruction based on delay-and-sum (DAS) method from the Matlab/Simulink environment. The general objective was to validate this model to compare the quality metrics of images against the computational one. Model results were validated using a gold reference, the Field II, a program for simulating ultrasound transducer fields and ultrasound imaging using linear acoustics. The model implements DAS beamforming to process 65 scanlines generated by a 128-element transducer. For quantitative analysis, the following metrics have been used: contrast resolution (CR), contrast-to-noise (CNR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), normalized residual sum of squares (NRSS), and full width at half maximum (FWHM). According to those metrics, the proposed model performance is strongly correlated comparatively to the reference, showing errors of 1.49%, 1.29%, 0.22%, 2.45%, 7.38% for the CR, CNR, SNR, FWHM, and NRMSE, respectively. As indicated by metrics the Matlab/Simulink model images are similar to the computational ones.

Keyphrases: B-mode image, Delay and Sum, Ultrasound, image quantifiers, quality indicators

@booklet{EasyChair:9165,
  author    = {Gilson Maekawa Kanashiro and Michel Andrey Freitas de Souza Kohler and Ednilson de Souza Contieri and Rojelio de Bairro and Larissa Comar Neves and Thiago Mathias Oliveira and Amauri Amorin Assef and Joaquim Miguel Maia and Eduardo Tavares Costa},
  title     = {Design, Simulation and Analysis of a Matlab/Simulink Based Delay-and-Sum Beamforming Model for Ultrasound Imaging},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9165},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}