A lossy compression scheme for pre-beamformer and post-beamformer ultrasound data

Abstract

We present a framework for lossy compression of ultrasound RF data. The proposed scheme can be deployed either before or after the receiver beamformer. It performs a two-dimensional decorrelation in both the lateral and axial directions. The decorrelation in the lateral direction is done using a Karhun-loeve like transform, e.g., DCT or Hadamard. The decorrelation in the axial direction is done using customized orthogonal wavelet packets that are optimized for a particular ultrasound probe. The effectiveness of the compression algorithm for both pre-beamformer and post-beamformer compression is established by evaluating the performance on a set of simulated ultrasound signals.