Development of deep learning-based holographic ultrasound generation algorithm

Recently, an ultrasound hologram and its applications have gained attention in the ultrasound research field. However, the determination technique of transmit signal phases, which generate a hologram, has not been significantly advanced from the previous algorithms which are time-consuming iterative methods. Thus, we applied the deep learning technique, which has been previously adopted to generate an optical hologram, to generate an ultrasound hologram. We further examined the Deep learning-based Holographic Ultrasound Generation algorithm (Deep-HUG). We implement the U-Net-based algorithm and examine its generalizability by training on a dataset, which consists of randomly distributed disks, and testing on the alphabets (A-Z). Furthermore, we compare the Deep-HUG with the previous algorithm in terms of computation time, accuracy, and uniformity. It was found that the accuracy and uniformity of the Deep-HUG are somewhat lower than those of the previous algorithm whereas the computation time is 190 times faster than that of the previous algorithm, demonstrating that Deep-HUG has potential as a useful technique to rapidly generate an ultrasound hologram for various applications.