An object-oriented multi-threaded software beamformation toolbox

Focusing and apodization are an essential part of signal processing in ultrasound imaging. Although the fun- damental principles are simple, the dramatic increase in computational power of CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs motivates the development of software based beamformers, which further improves image quality (and the accu- racy of velocity estimation). For developing new imaging methods, it is important to establish proof-of-concept before using resources on real-time implementations. With this in mind, an eective and versatile Matlab toolbox written in C++ has been developed to assist in developing new beam formation strategies. It is a general 3D implementation capable of handling a multitude of focusing methods, interpolation schemes, and parametric and dynamic apodization. Despite being exible, it is capable of exploiting parallelization on a single computer, on a cluster, or on both. On a single computer, it mimics the parallization in a scanner containing multiple beam formers. The focusing is determined using the positions of the transducer elements, presence of virtual sources, and the focus points. For interpolation, a number of interpolation schemes can be chosen, e.g. linear, polyno- mial, or cubic splines. Apodization can be specied by a number of window functions of xed size applied on the individual elements as a function of distance to a reference point, or it can be dynamic with an expanding or contracting aperture to obtain a constant F-number, or both. On a standard PC with an Intel Quad-Core Xeon E5520 processor running at 2.26 GHz, the toolbox can beamform 300:000 points using 700:000 data samples in 3 seconds using a transducer with 192 elements, dynamic apodization in transmit and receive, and cubic splines for interpolation. This is 19 times faster than our previous toolbox.