High dynamic range ultrasound imaging with real-time filtered-delay multiply and sum beamforming

Most commercially available ultrasound imaging systems currently implement the delay and sum (DAS) beamforming. Alternative beamformers have been presented, offering higher performance at the expense of computational complexity, which has so far limited their practical real-time implementation. In particular, the Filtered-Delay Multiply and Sum (F-DMAS) beamformer, which adds the computation of signed square roots, absolute values and multiplications to DAS, was recently shown to be effective in improving resolution, dynamic range and overall image quality. In this work, we present the real-time implementation of the F-DMAS beamformer on the ULA-OP 256 research system. This is obtained through a reformulation of the F-DMAS algorithm that allows reducing its computational cost. Compared to DAS, F-DMAS images of a commercial phantom captured in real-time showed higher CR (up to +7 dB), better spatial resolution (up to 30%), but lower CNR (-40%).