Real-time Volumetric Synthetic Aperture Software Beamforming of Row-Column Probe Data

Two delay-and-sum beamformers for 3-D synthetic aperture imaging with row-column addressed arrays are presented. Both beamformers are software implementations for graphics processing unit (GPU) execution with dynamic apodizations and 3rd order polynomial subsample interpolation. The first beamformer was written in the MATLAB programming language and the second was written in C/C++ with the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) extensions by NVIDIA.

Performance was measured as volume rate and sample throughput on three different GPUs: a 1050 Ti, a 1080 Ti, and a TITAN V. The beamformers were evaluated across 112 combinations of output geometry, depth range, transducer array size, number of virtual sources, floating point precision, and Nyquist rate or inphase/ quadrature beamforming using analytic signals.

Real-time imaging defined as more than 30 volumes per second was attained by the CUDA beamformer on the three GPUs for 13, 27, and 43 setups, respectively. The MATLAB beamformer did not attain real-time imaging for any setup. The median, single precision sample throughput of the CUDA beamformer was 4.9, 20.8, and 33.5 gigasamples per second on the three GPUs, respectively.

The CUDA beamformer's throughput was an order of magnitude higher than that of the MATLAB beamformer.