Adaptive 3D beamforming for ultrasound systems deploying linear and planar phased array probes

The present work is part of the European Commission project ADUMS (IST-2001-34088) aimed at developing a fully digital 4D ultrasound system for medical imaging applications. The system is based on adaptive beamforming, which provides better resolution with respect to conventional beamforming. The parallel algorithm adopted allows for decomposing the planar array beamforming into two linear steps, and for implementation on a parallel computing architecture. The present paper describes the testing results of our adaptive beamforming structure, on both simulated and real data. Comparisons with conventional beamforming, under the same operating conditions are also shown.