Compressed Fresnel beamformer for portable ultrasound imaging system

Beamfromer forms a vital part of ultrasound imaging systems having a major share in cost, power and hardware footprint of complete system. The amount of data handled in a typical beamforming block of an ultrasound imaging system is considerably large due to substantial number of transducers. Consequently, computational power required will be huge as is the foot-print of complete system. Recently, in order to cut down these requirements, reduction in sampling rate of the system is being achieved through compressive sensing techniques. One such technique is Finite Rate of Innovation framework. In this paper, authors make use of this framework and Fresnel concept to propose a compressed Fresnel beamformer aimed at reducing the hardware complexity and also communication cost. The results obtained show a significant reduction in sampling rate required for the complete system.