P5C-6 Compact Ultrasound Scanner with Built-in Raw Data Acquisition Capabilities

A research data acquisition tool named "IQscan" on a commercial ultrasound system is presented. IQscan enables the in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) components of pre- detected image data to be acquired and exported as a raw data DICOM file. The capabilities of this built-in feature for a compact and battery-operated scanner are described, and are demonstrated by two application examples. The first example involves a 3 MHz curved array scan of a nylon-fiber-target phantom and demonstrates the reconstruction from I/Q to radio frequency (RF) echo data, as well as the typical Gaussian-shaped transmit waveforms. The second example demonstrates a new "pixel compounding" technique that aims at recovering echo details from noisy data by compensating for sub-pixel displacement between successive image frames. Key to obtaining sub-wavelength displacement estimates is having access to the phase information in the I/Q data. Results for both phantom and in vivo IQscan data obtained using a 7.5 MHz linear array show promising image quality improvements.