Yoon, H.; Kim, J.; Lee, K.; Song, T.-K. Design and Implementation of Analog-Digital Hybrid Beamformers for Low-Complexity Ultrasound Systems: A Feasibility Study. Bioengineering2024, 11, 8.
Yoon, H.; Kim, J.; Lee, K.; Song, T.-K. Design and Implementation of Analog-Digital Hybrid Beamformers for Low-Complexity Ultrasound Systems: A Feasibility Study. Bioengineering 2024, 11, 8.
Yoon, H.; Kim, J.; Lee, K.; Song, T.-K. Design and Implementation of Analog-Digital Hybrid Beamformers for Low-Complexity Ultrasound Systems: A Feasibility Study. Bioengineering2024, 11, 8.
Yoon, H.; Kim, J.; Lee, K.; Song, T.-K. Design and Implementation of Analog-Digital Hybrid Beamformers for Low-Complexity Ultrasound Systems: A Feasibility Study. Bioengineering 2024, 11, 8.
Abstract
Low-complexity ultrasound systems are increasingly desired for wearable point-of-care ultra-sound and massive-channel ultrasound for 3-D matrix imaging. However, the system complexity is closely associated with the imaging capabilities, remaining as a challenge. To resolve this limitation, this study revisits the general structures of analog and digital beamformers and in-troduces a hybrid approach to implement efficient ultrasound systems. The suggested hybrid beamforming takes two stages, where the first analog stage partially beamforms M-channel RF signals to N sum-out data (M-to-N beamforming), and the second digital stage beamforms N partial sums to single final beamformed data (N-to-1 beamforming). Our approach was systematically designed and implemented, which was demonstrated with a customized 64-channel 1-D phased array using a tissue mimicking phantom. The demonstrated results indicate that the analog-digital hybrid beamforming can be applied to any kind of arrays for sophisticated 3-D imaging and tiny wearable ultrasound applications.
Keywords
analog beamforming; hybrid beamforming systems; point-of-care ultrasound; wearable ultrasound; massive-channel systems; ultrasound system design
Subject
Engineering, Bioengineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
