English

From Narrow to Wide: Autoencoding Transformers for Ultrasound Bandwidth Recovery

Signal Processing 2025-11-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Conventional pulse-echo ultrasound suffers when low-cost probes deliver only narrow fractional bandwidths, elongating pulses and erasing high-frequency detail. We address this limitation by learning a data-driven mapping from band-limited to broadband spectrogram of radio-frequency (RF) lines. To this end, a variation of Tiny Vision Transform (ViT) auto-encoder is trained on simulation data using a curriculum-weighted loss. On heterogeneous speckle-cyst phantoms, the network reduces image-domain MSE by 90 percent, boosts PSNR by 6.7 dB, and raises SSIM to 0.965 compared with the narrow-band input. It also sharpens point-target rows in a completely unseen resolution phantom, demonstrating strong out-of-distribution generalisation without sacrificing frame rate or phase information. These results indicate that a purely software upgrade can endow installed narrow-band probes with broadband-like performance, potentially widening access to high-resolution ultrasound in resource-constrained settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.02938,
  title  = {From Narrow to Wide: Autoencoding Transformers for Ultrasound Bandwidth Recovery},
  author = {Sepideh KhakzadGharamaleki and Hassan Rivaz and Brandon Helfield},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.02938},
  year   = {2025}
}