Deep data compression for approximate ultrasonic image formation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep neural network-based data compression method tailored for ultrasonic imaging, significantly improving compression rates while maintaining image quality by integrating the image formation process into the training.

Contribution

It presents a novel encoder-decoder architecture with vector quantization and end-to-end training that optimizes data compression for a specific ultrasonic image formation method.

Findings

Achieves higher compression rates than theoretical lossless limits.

Maintains high image quality at increased compression levels.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of tailored deep compression for ultrasonic imaging.

Abstract

In many ultrasonic imaging systems, data acquisition and image formation are performed on separate computing devices. Data transmission is becoming a bottleneck, thus, efficient data compression is essential. Compression rates can be improved by considering the fact that many image formation methods rely on approximations of wave-matter interactions, and only use the corresponding part of the data. Tailored data compression could exploit this, but extracting the useful part of the data efficiently is not always trivial. In this work, we tackle this problem using deep neural networks, optimized to preserve the image quality of a particular image formation method. The Delay-And-Sum (DAS) algorithm is examined which is used in reflectivity-based ultrasonic imaging. We propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture with vector quantization and formulate image formation as a network layer for end-to-end training. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed data compression tailored for a specific image formation method obtains significantly better results as opposed to compression agnostic to subsequent imaging. We maintain high image quality at much higher compression rates than the theoretical lossless compression rate derived from the rank of the linear imaging operator. This demonstrates the great potential of deep ultrasonic data compression tailored for a specific image formation method.