Sub-Nyquist medical ultrasound imaging: En route to cloud processing

In medical ultrasound imaging, a pulse of known shape is transmitted into the respective medium, and the received echoes are sampled and digitally processed in a way referred to as beamforming to form an ultrasound image. Applied spatially, beamforming allows to improve resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. The structure of medical ultrasound signals allow for significant reduction of both sampling and processing rates by relying on ideas of Xampling, sub-Nyquist sampling and frequency domain beamforming. In this paper we present an implementation on an ultrasound machine using sub-Nyquist sampling and processing and the obtained imaging results. The provided system configuration exploits the advantages of beamforming in the frequency domain, which is performed at a low-rate. Our results prove that the concept of porting heavy computational tasks to the cloud is feasible for medical ultrasound, leading to potential of considerable reduction in future ultrasound machines size, power consumption and cost.