technion/bladder/README.md

metadata

pretty_name: OpenH-RF — Technion Bladder Pre-Beamformed Channel Data
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
  - image-to-image
tags:
  - ultrasound
  - iq
  - openh-rf
  - beamforming
  - bladder
  - 3d
language:
  - en
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K

OpenH-RF — Bladder pre-beamformed RF channel data

Dataset Description

Real, in-vivo human pre-beamformed ultrasound channel data for bladder imaging: per-element I/Q recorded before receive beamforming on a 64-element phased array — a sector scan of 180 transmit beams steered over ±45.13° (≈90°), one image line per transmit (steering angles in scan.polar_angles). 1,508 frames across 14 sweeps from seven subjects. Acquired on a GE research system in tissue-harmonic mode; the harmonic echo is demodulated to I/Q at 3.44 MHz and band-pass filtered. No paired image is supplied — the B-mode is reproduced from the channel data by the released beamformer.

Dataset Contributor(s)

Sanketh Vedula, Ortal Senouf, Dean Zadok, Alex M. Bronstein (PI) — Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Primary contact: sanketh@campus.technion.ac.il.

Dataset Creation Date

Source data 2018; converted to the OpenH-RF (zea) format 07/16/2026.

License / Terms of Use

CC BY 4.0. The contributors confirm intent to release under CC BY 4.0 with no third-party IP encumbrances (proposal §8).

Intended Usage

Primary: generalized reconstruction (§6.1) — learned receive beamforming and image reconstruction from raw channel data. The quasi-static bladder is also suited to multi-line-transmission (MLT) emulation and high-frame-rate research, and to anatomy/cohort interpretation (§6.5).

Dataset Characterization

• Data Collection Method: in-vivo human (research platform) — GE Vivid S70 scanner with raw per-element channel access, tissue-harmonic mode.
• Labeling Method: N/A — no per-frame image label; the zea.Pipeline in pipeline.yaml reconstructs a B-mode from the channel data for validation.
• Acquisition system: GE Vivid S70 scanner; GE 3Sc-RS 64-element phased-array probe, 0.30 mm pitch; sector scan, 180 transmit beams steered over ±45.13° (≈90.25° FOV), one image line per transmit. Per proposal: 2.56-cycle 1.6 MHz transmit, no transmit apodization, tissue-harmonic mode, harmonic echo demodulated to I/Q at 3.44 MHz and filtered, ~18 fps; transversal plane with slow longitudinal probe sweep to decorrelate frames.

Dataset Format

zea file format, one HDF5 file per sweep (data/<subject>.hdf5, e.g. a1.hdf5, ak.hdf5, s2.hdf5). The source complex double samples were repackaged to float32 I/Q with I and Q on the final channel axis (n_ch = 2); values are otherwise verbatim (band-pass filtered baseband IQ, as archived). Each file carries metadata/subject/{id,type=human}, metadata/credit, and metadata/annotations/{anatomy=bladder, label=in vivo, view=transverse suprapubic pelvic ultrasound}. Probe model (probe.name = GE 3Sc-RS) and scanner (us_machine = GE Vivid S70) are stored too.

Dataset Quantification

Current OpenH-RF release: 14 HDF5 files; 83.71 GB (83,713,785,856 bytes) stored; root zea_version 0.1.4. Sizes include all HDF5 contents and use decimal units (MB = 10^6 bytes, GB = 10^9 bytes, TB = 10^12 bytes), not decoded-array memory or original-source download sizes.

• Frames / sweeps / subjects: 1,508 frames · 14 sweeps · 7 subjects.
• Train / val / test split: N/A (contributor to define).
• Stored HDF5 size: 83.71 GB (83,713,785,856 bytes).

Field	Shape	dtype	Units	Description
data/raw_data	(n_frames, 180, 696, 64, 2)	float32	a.u.	pre-BF channel IQ: frames × tx-lines × axial × elements × {I, Q}
scan/sampling_frequency	scalar	float32	Hz	3.333 MHz (IQ sample rate, from specs)
scan/center_frequency, demodulation_frequency	scalar	float32	Hz	3.44 MHz (tissue-harmonic demod, from specs)
scan/sound_speed	scalar	float32	m/s	1540
scan/polar_angles	(180,)	float32	rad	±45.13° steered lines (thetaTX)
probe/probe_geometry	(64, 3)	float32	m	element positions, 0.30 mm pitch

Subject Metadata

Seven in-vivo human volunteers, 14 sweeps, 1,508 frames. (The proposal's "six" was an undercount; verified from the acquisitions to be seven distinct volunteers.) No phantom is included in this collection — the calibration phantom is a separate submission (../phantom/). No PHI stored: only anonymized subject.id, subject.type = human, and annotations.anatomy = bladder. Age and sex were not recorded for these acquisitions.

Subject	Sweeps (files)	Frames
A	a1, a2	215
AK	ak	107
H	h1, h2	216
O	o1	108
OK	ok1, ok2	216
P	p1a, p1b, p2a, p2b	430
S	s1, s2	216

Data Validation

reconstruct.py reconstructs a B-mode from raw_data using the zea.Pipeline defined in pipeline.yaml: delay-and-sum beamforming on a polar scanline grid (one image line per transmit, receive dynamic focusing at f-number 1) → envelope detection → normalization → log compression → sector scan conversion. Run it on any file to reproduce a reference frame:

python reconstruct.py data/s2.hdf5 --frame 54 --out bmode_s2.png

Reference output: bmode_s2.png. The pipeline matches the acquisition's own receive-beamforming geometry (code/processing/), so the reconstruction reproduces the expected sector B-mode.

Known Issues

• No paired image target (unlike the cardiac set); the B-mode is derived from the channel data, not supplied.
• Transmit fundamental (1.6 MHz) not stored — only the 3.44 MHz demodulation frequency is in the files, so center_frequency equals the demodulation frequency.

Ethical Considerations

Privacy safeguards (HIPAA and GDPR). Pre-beamformed RF channel data contains no facial or otherwise identifying imagery. All records are de-identified to the HIPAA Safe Harbor standard, with direct identifiers removed and any dates generalized to bands. As an EU institution we additionally comply with GDPR, holding any pseudonymized subject identifiers separately on access-controlled storage and never sharing them. The released data are de-identified and contain only the channel signals and acquisition metadata.

Ethics. The data were collected under ethical best practices on healthy volunteers.