Deep Learning-based Universal Beamformer for Ultrasound Imaging

In ultrasound (US) imaging, individual channel RF measurements are back-propagated and accumulated to form an image after applying specific delays. While this time reversal is usually implemented using a hardware- or software-based delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer, the performance of DAS decreases rapidly in situations where data acquisition is not ideal. Herein, for the first time, we demonstrate that a single data-driven beamformer designed as a deep neural network can directly process sub-sampled RF data acquired at different sampling rates to generate high quality US images. In particular, the proposed deep beamformer is evaluated for two distinct acquisition schemes: focused ultrasound imaging and planewave imaging. Experimental results showed that the proposed deep beamformer exhibit significant performance gain for both focused and planar imaging schemes, in terms of contrast-to-noise ratio and structural similarity.