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3D/4D Ultrasonography

Details: Category: Home; Published on Thursday, 17 May 2018 13:25; Written by Super User; Hits: 3714

Dr hab. Jurij Tasinkiewicz

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Ultrasound Department

Research topics:

3D/4D Ultrasonography

Description of research topics in the scope of the proposed PhD thesis:

- Development of the modern real-time 3D ultrasound image reconstruction methods based on temporal-spatial frequency domain transformation techniques
- Development and implementation of advanced spectrum domain image filtration based on deconvolution and spread spectrum matched signals

Ultrasound is an inexpensive and widely used imaging modality for the diagnosis and staging of a number of diseases. In the past two decades rapid advancements in the development of ultrasound imaging techniques have helped to improve diagnosis by providing immediate clinical information. It is its speed, cost-effectiveness, flexibility and noninvasive nature which make the ultrasound imaging more competitive over other imaging modalities. The most recent advances in ultrasound technology now provide 3D imaging capabilities in real-time (4D imaging). Significant development has been the introduction and fast development of portable, hand-held ultrasound systems with advanced computational power. They are becoming more popular among clinicians, especially for point-of-care diagnosis. Hand-carried ultrasound systems are primarily used for imaging internal organs, including heart and peripheral vasculature. However, implementing a high-resolution and high-quality image real-time 3D ultrasound system within the power budget constraints of a hand-held portable device is difficult and extremely complex technologically. Among the unresolved challenges the following can be mentioned:

- transmit/receive electronics design- 2D array transducers design and manufacturing,
- connections of 2D arrays comprised of thousands of elements to the transmit and receive electronics
- power limitations of the hand-held systems
- huge amount of input/output data that must be transferred and processed.
- development of fast and efficient algorithms for 3D/4D image reconstruction which should be used in the portable hand-held devices.

This will be the main topic of the proposed PhD thesis.

Deconvolution is aimed at correcting the bandwidth, which is usually limited in ultrasound imaging. Main limitation comes from the ultrasonic transducer; spectral content (both amplitude and phase) is also altered along the propagation path (temporal domain) and by spatial response of the ultrasonic beam (spatial domain). In such case deconvolution result is only valid at the position where the reference signal was taken. The idea of the project is to make the reference signal adaptive. Moreover, performance of deconvolution significantly depends on signal-to-noise ration. Therefore, another research topic will be connected with development of deconvolution algorithms using matched spread spectrum signals to ensure both bandwidth and SNR. Specifically, frequency domain 3D/4D image reconstruction methods will be developed with point-spread function (PSF) based deconvolution implemented in spectrum domain for image quality improvement.