Model-Based Iterative Reconstruction and Direct Deep Learning for One-Sided Ultrasonic Non-Destructive Evaluation
Creators: name: Almansouri, Hani A.
Publisher: name: Purdue University Graduate School
Year: 2019
Subjects: Image processing

description: One-sided ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation (UNDE) is extensively used to characterize structures that need to be inspected and maintained from defects and flaws that could affect the performance of power plants, such as nuclear power plants. Most UNDE systems send acoustic pulses into the structure of interest, measure the received waveform and use an algorithm to reconstruct the quantity of interest. The most widely used algorithm in UNDE systems is the synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) because it produces acceptable results in real time. A few regularized inversion techniques with linear models have been proposed which can improve on SAFT, but they tend to make simplifying assumptions that show artifacts and do not address how to obtain reconstructions from large real data sets. In this thesis, we present two studies. The first study covers the model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR) technique which is used to resolve some of the issues in SAFT and the current linear regularized inversion techniques, and the second study covers the direct deep learning (DDL) technique which is used to further resolve issues related to non-linear interactions between the ultrasound signal and the specimen. In the first study, we propose a model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR) algorithm designed for scanning UNDE systems. MBIR reconstructs the image by optimizing a cost function that contains two terms: the forward model that models the measurements and the prior model that models the object. To further reduce some of the artifacts in the results, we enhance the forward model of MBIR to account for the direct arrival artifacts and the isotropic artifacts. The direct arrival signals are the signals received directly from the transmitter without being reflected. These signals contain no useful information about the specimen and produce high amplitude artifacts in regions close to the transducers. We resolve this issue by modeling these direct arrival signals in the forward model to reduce their artifacts while maintaining information from reflections of other objects. Next, the isotropic artifacts appear when the transmitted signal is assumed to propagate in all directions equally. Therefore, we modify our forward model to resolve this issue by modeling the anisotropic propagation. Next, because of the significant attenuation of the transmitted signal as it propagates through deeper regions, the reconstruction of deeper regions tends to be much dimmer than closer regions. Therefore, we combine the forward model with a spatially variant prior model to account for the attenuation by reducing the regularization as the pixel gets deeper. Next, for scanning large structures, multiple scans are required to cover the whole field of view. Typically, these scans are performed in raster order which makes adjacent scans share some useful correlations. Reconstructing each scan individually and performing a conventional stitching method is not an efficient way because this could produce stitching artifacts and ignore extra information from adjacent scans. We present an algorithm to jointly reconstruct measurements from large data sets that reduces the stitching artifacts and exploits useful information from adjacent scans. Next, using simulated and extensive experimental data, we show MBIR results and demonstrate how we can improve over SAFT as well as existing regularized inversion techniques. However, even with this improvement, MBIR still results in some artifacts caused by the inherent non-linearity of the interaction between the ultrasound signal and the specimen. In the second study, we propose DDL, a non-iterative model-based reconstruction method for inverting measurements that are based on non-linear forward models for ultrasound imaging. Our approach involves obtaining an approximate estimate of the reconstruction using a simple linear back-projection and training a deep neural network to refine this to the actual reconstruction. While the technique we are proposing can show significant enhancement compared to the current techniques with simulated data, one issue appears with the performance of this technique when applied to experimental data. The issue is a modeling mismatch between the simulated training data and the real data. We propose an effective solution that can reduce the effect of this modeling mismatch by adding noise to the simulation input of the training set before simulation. This solution trains the neural network on the general features of the system rather than specific features of the simulator and can act as a regularization to the neural network. Another issue appears similar to the issue in MBIR caused by the attenuation of deeper reflections. Therefore, we propose a spatially variant amplification technique applied to the back-projection to amplify deeper regions. Next, to reconstruct from a large field of view that requires multiple scans, we propose a joint deep neural network technique to jointly reconstruct an image from these multiple scans. Finally, we apply DDL to simulated and experimental ultrasound data to demonstrate significant improvements in image quality compared to the delay-and-sum approach and the linear model-based reconstruction approach.<br>