A novel beamforming method for wireless ultrasound smart probe

Recently, in the field of medical ultrasound systems, the wireless smart probe is attracting attention mainly due to its benefits such as improved mobility, ease of use, and effective infection control. This probe has a constraint that all or part of the system beamformer should be integrated inside the probe handle to reduce the data transmission rate of the echo signals that should be transmitted from the probe to the main system. In this case, we should minimize the space of the integrated beamformer, as well as the power dissipation of the hardware in order not to violate the safety regulation, degrade the performance, or make the user uncomfortable due to the generated heat, while maintaining its proper performance. In this paper, we propose a novel beamforming method for wireless smart probe which combines sub-aperture beamforming with phase rotation, digital beamforming, and synthetic aperture sequential beamforming altogether in order to design a probe that meets these constraints effectively and is affordably implementable. The proposed method is verified by the Field II simulation, and the results show that the overall performance of the proposed method is comparable to that of the conventional delay-and-sum beamformer.