Compression of ultrasound RF data using quantization and decimation

Beamforming the ultrasound radiofrequency (RF) data on the computer in stead of doing it on the hardware is currently developed in many research groups. This requires fast transferring of the large amount of data in real-time from the ultrasound scanner front end to the computer. Despite of using an expensive hardware for fast data transfer, we are interested in compress the data before transferring. This paper presents a method to compress the RF data by applying quantization and decimation on the baseband signals of the RF data. Simulation and experimental RF data are tested. The number of bits and the number of samples remaining in the phase and amplitude data are reported. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the RF data after beamformed and the visual quality of the reconstructed images are compared.