An Open, Modular, Ultrasound Digitial Signal Processing Specification

Abstract

Digital signal processing is used in almost all ultrasound research with groups tending to develop their own software, using different data formats and programming languages. Existing works demonstrate open approaches to digital signal processing, such as the Ultrasound File Format based UltraSound ToolBox. Such tools are highly valuable as they ease collaboration and improve reproducibility, but they tend to be tailored to a specific application and may not translate easily to other ultrasound tasks and modalities. As DSP problems are often drawn from a pool of common operations, this work aims to develop an approach using smaller modules to allow greater flexibility. A specification defining a combined processing framework and data format is presented. Existing implementations are presented in both MATLAB and C++, and some of the features the platform enables are discussed. The proposed specification and implementations are intended to be open source and to allow extensive collaboration between groups.