Automatic time gain compensation and dynamic range control in ultrasound imaging systems

For efficient and accurate diagnosis of ultrasound images, the 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 is for controlling the image contrast. In recent ultrasound systems, those 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 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. Experimental results are obtained by applying the proposed algorithm to a real ultrasound (US) imaging system. The results prove that the proposed algorithm automatically sets values of TGC and DR in real-time so that the subjective quality of the enhanced ultrasound images may become good enough for efficient and accurate diagnosis.