Lamb Waves and Adaptive Beamforming for Aberration Correction in Medical Ultrasound Imaging

Moein Mozaffarzadeh, Claudio Minonzio, Nico de Jong, Martin Verweij, Simone Hemm, Verya Daeichin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)
167 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Phase aberration in transcranial ultrasound imaging (TUI) caused by the human skull leads to an inaccurate image reconstruction. In this article, we present a novel method for estimating the speed of sound and an adaptive beamforming technique for phase aberration correction in a flat polyvinylchloride (PVC) slab as a model for the human skull. First, the speed of sound of the PVC slab is found by extracting the overlapping quasi-longitudinal wave velocities of symmetrical Lamb waves in the frequency-wavenumber domain. Then, the thickness of the plate is determined by the echoes from its front and back side. Next, an adaptive beamforming method is developed, utilizing the measured sound speed map of the imaging medium. Finally, to minimize reverberation artifacts caused by strong scatterers (i.e., needles), a dual probe setup is proposed. In this setup, we image the medium from two opposite directions, and the final image can be the minimum intensity projection of the inherently co-registered images of the opposed probes. Our results confirm that the Lamb wave method estimates the longitudinal speed of the slab with an error of 3.5% and is independent of its shear wave speed. Benefiting from the acquired sound speed map, our adaptive beamformer reduces (in real time) a mislocation error of 3.1, caused by an 8 mm slab, to 0.1 mm. Finally, the dual probe configuration shows 7 dB improvement in removing reverberation artifacts of the needle, at the cost of only 2.4-dB contrast loss. The proposed image formation method can be used, e.g., to monitor deep brain stimulation procedures and localization of the electrode(s) deep inside the brain from two temporal bones on the sides of the human skull.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9133444
Pages (from-to)84-91
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control
Volume68
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Bibliographical note

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.

Keywords

  • Transcranial ultrasound imaging
  • Lamb waves
  • adaptive beamforming
  • sound speed map
  • deep brain stimulation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Lamb Waves and Adaptive Beamforming for Aberration Correction in Medical Ultrasound Imaging'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this