Towards establishing a design rule for aperture parameters in minimum-variance beamforming

Two aperture parameters in minimum-variance (MV) beamforming have been reported to affect the output image quality and the computational load of the beamformer realization. We analyzed the image quality, image quality gain and GPU computing cost of various transducer receive aperture and all possible sub-aperture sizes, towards establishing a design rule for the two aperture parameters. The aperture selection criteria was based on the tradeoff among image quality, quality gain and computing cost. The proper aperture parameters provided us the possibility of building a real-time high-image-quality MV beamformer for medical ultrasound imaging. Moreover, the image quality analysis indicates that MV beamforming has the advantage of reducing demanded transducer elements for highquality imaging.