Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hansen-Shearer, Joseph
• Lerendegui, Marcelo
• Toulemonde, Matthieu
• Tang, Meng-Xing

Titel

Ultrafast 3-D Ultrasound Imaging using Row-Column Array specific Frame-Multiply-and-Sum Beamforming

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control, 2022-02, Vol.69 (2), p.1-1

Ort / Verlag

United States: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

• IEEE_Xplore

Quelle

IEL

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Row-column arrays have been shown to be able to generate 3-D ultrafast ultrasound images with an order of magnitude less independent electronic channels than traditional 2-D matrix arrays. Unfortunately, row-column array images suffer from major imaging artefacts due to high side-lobes, particularly when operating at high frame rates. This paper proposes a row-column specific beamforming technique, for orthogonal plane wave transmissions, that exploits the incoherent nature of certain row-column array artefacts. A series of volumetric images are produced using row or column transmissions of 3-D plane waves. The voxel-wise geometric mean of the beamformed volumetric images from each row and column pair is taken prior to compounding, which drastically reduces the incoherent imaging artefacts in the resulting image compared to traditional coherent compounding. The effectiveness of this technique was demonstrated in silico and in vitro, and the results show a significant reduction in side-lobe level with over 16 dB improvement in side-lobe to main-lobe energy ratio. Significantly improved contrast was demonstrated with contrast ratio increased by ~10dB and generalised contrast-to-noise ratio increased by 158% when using the proposed new method compared to existing delay and sum during in vitro studies. The new technique allowed for higher quality 3-D imaging whilst maintaining high frame rate potential.