2010 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 37, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2018
Deep Neural Networks for Ultrasound
Beamforming
Adam C. Luchies ,
Member, IEEE
, and Brett C. Byram,
Member, IEEE
Abstract
— We investigate the use of deep neural
networks (DNNs) for suppressing off-axis scattering in
ultrasound channel data. Our implementation operates in
the frequency domain via the short-time Fourier transform.
The inputs to the DNN consisted of the separated real
and imaginary components (i.e. in-phase and quadrature
components) observed across the aperture of the array,
at a single frequency and for a single depth. Different
networks were trained for different frequencies. The out-
put had the same structure as the input and the real and
imaginary components were combined as complex data
before an inverse short-time Fourier transform was used
to reconstruct channel data. Using simulation, physical
phantom experiment, and
in vivo
scans from a human liver,
we compared this DNN approach to standard delay-and-
sum (DAS) beamforming and an adaptive imaging technique
that uses the coherence factor. For a simulated point target,
the side lobes when using the DNN approach were about
60 dB below those of standard DAS. For a simulated ane-
choic cyst, the DNN approach improved contrast ratio (CR)
and contrast-to-noise (CNR) ratio by 8.8 dB and 0.3 dB,
respectively, compared with DAS. For an anechoic cyst in
a physical phantom, the DNN approach improved CR and
CNR by 17.1 dB and 0.7 dB, respectively. For two
in vivo
scans, the DNN approach improved CR and CNR by 13.8 dB
and 9.7 dB, respectively. We also explored methods for
examining how the networks in this paper function.
Index Terms
— Ultrasound imaging, neural networks,
beamforming, image contrast enhancement, off-axis
scattering.
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer is the standard
method for combining ultrasound array channel signals
into the ultrasound radio-frequency (RF) signals used to create
a B-mode image. The algorithm consists of applying phase
delays and weights to each channel before channel signal
summation. The phase delays are used to focus the beam on
receive and the channel weights are used to control the beam
characteristics, including main lobe width and side lobe levels.
Sources of ultrasound image degradation such as off-axis
scattering, multi-path reverberation, and phase aberration limit
Manuscript received January 5, 2018; accepted February 15, 2018.
Date of publication February 27, 2018; date of current version August 30,
2018. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under
Grant R01EB020040.
(Corresponding author: Adam C. Luchies.)
The authors are with the Department of Biomedical Engi-
neering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37212 USA (e-mail:
adam.c.luchies@vanderbilt.edu; brett.c.byram@vanderbilt.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMI.2018.2809641
the clinical use of ultrasound imaging. For this reason, numer-
ous techniques have been proposed to improve ultrasound
image quality [1]–[4]. Few of these techniques have transferred
to the clinic. One notable exception is harmonic imaging,
which discards all of the useful information at the fundamen-
tal frequency and forms images using the second harmonic
waveform generated from non-linear propagation.
Byram et al. developed a model based beamforming
method called aperture domain model image reconstruction
(ADMIRE) [4], [5]. They tuned ADMIRE to improve ultra-
sound image quality by suppressing sources of image degrada-
tion. In addition, the development of ADMIRE demonstrated
that beamforming could be posed as a nonlinear regression
problem, which suggests that a deep neural network (DNN)
might be used to accomplish the same task. This is important
because ADMIRE is relatively inefficient. In contrast, DNNs
take a long time to train but once trained can be implemented
efficiently.
Recently, DNNs have been used to improve the state of
the art in applications such as image classification [6], speech
recognition [7], natural language processing [8], object detec-
tion [9], and others. DNNs consist of cascaded layers of
artificial neurons. Although individual artificial neurons are
simplistic processing units, when combined in a single layer
network, they can be used to approximate any continuous
function [10]. The potential contributions of DNNs to medical
image classification have been and continue to be investi-
gated [11]. In contrast, the impact of DNNs on medical image
reconstruction are just starting to be examined [12], [13].
The goal of this paper was to significantly expand and report
on our previous work to integrate DNNs into an ultrasound
beamformer and to train them to improve the quality of the
resulting ultrasound images [14].
II. M
ETHODS
A. Frequency Domain Sub-Band Processing
Several methods have relied on processing ultrasound chan-
nel data in the frequency domain to offer improvements
to ultrasound image quality. For example, Holfort et al.
applied the minimum variance (MV) beamforming tech-
nique in the frequency domain to improve ultrasound image
resolution [15]. Shin and Huang [16] applied frequency-
space prediction filtering in the frequency domain to sup-
press acoustic clutter and noise. ADMIRE also operates in
the frequency domain to suppress off-axis scattering and
reverberation [4], [5].
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