Ultrasound Image Enhancement Based on Automatic Time Gain Compensation and Dynamic Range Control

Abstract

For efficient and accurate diagnosis of ultrasound images, appropriate time gain compensation(TGC) and dynamic range(DR) control of ultrasound echo signals are important. TGC is used for compensating the attenuation of ultrasound echo signals along the depth, and DR controls the image contrast. In recent ultrasound systems, these two factors are automatically set by a system and/or manually adjusted by an operator to obtain the desired image quality on the screen. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to find the optimized parameter values for TGC and DR automatically. In TGC optimization, we determine the degree of attenuation compensation along the depth by dividing an image into vertical strips and reliably estimating the attenuation characteristic of ultrasound signals. For DR optimization, we define a novel cost function by properly using the characteristics of ultrasound images. We obtain experimental results by applying the proposed algorithm to a real ultrasound(US) imaging system. The results verify that the proposed algorithm automatically sets values of TGC and DR in real-time such that the subjective quality of the enhanced ultrasound images may be sufficiently high for efficient and accurate diagnosis.