3D ultrasound computer tomography (3D USCT) promises reproducible high-resolution images for early detection of breast tumors. The KIT prototype provides three different modalities (reflectivity, speed of sound (SOS), and attenuation). For high resolution reflectivity images phase aberration correction using the SOS images is necessary. The synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) used for reflectivity image reconstruction is highly compute-intensive but suitable for an accelerated execution on GPUs. In this paper we investigate how the calculation of the phase aberration correction can be optimized and integrated into the SAFT algorithm. We analysed different strategies to optimize the trade off between memory requirement and image quality. For 64 slices with 1024² pixels a reconstruction can be done in 34 min on eight GPUs with a performance of 58.4 GV/s in comparison to the GPU reconstruction without phase aberration correction which needs 23 min. The average error made by the optimized SOS calculation is negligible.

Date Published: 20 March 2014
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9040, Medical Imaging 2014: Ultrasonic Imaging and Tomography, 90400W (20 March 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2042669

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9040:
Medical Imaging 2014: Ultrasonic Imaging and Tomography
Johan G. Bosch; Marvin M. Doyley, Editor(s)