Large-pitch steerable synthetic transmit aperture imaging (LPSSTA)

Ying Li; Michael C. Kolios; Yuan Xu

doi:10.1117/12.2216908

1 April 2016 Large-pitch steerable synthetic transmit aperture imaging (LPSSTA)

Ying Li, Michael C. Kolios, Yuan Xu

Proceedings Volume 9790, Medical Imaging 2016: Ultrasonic Imaging and Tomography; 97901Y (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2216908
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2016, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

A linear ultrasound array system usually has a larger pitch and is less costly than a phased array system, but loses the ability to fully steer the ultrasound beam. In this paper, we propose a system whose hardware is similar to a large-pitch linear array system, but whose ability to steer the beam is similar to a phased array system. The motivation is to reduce the total number of measurement channels M (the product of the number of transmissions, n_T, and the number of the receive channels in each transmission, n_R), while maintaining reasonable image quality. We combined adjacent elements (with proper delays introduced) into groups that would be used in both the transmit and receive processes of synthetic transmit aperture imaging. After the M channels of RF data were acquired, a pseudo-inversion was applied to estimate the equivalent signal in traditional STA to reconstruct a STA image. Even with the similar M, different choices of n_T and n_R will produce different image quality. The images produced with M=N²/15 in the selected regions of interest (ROI) were demonstrated to be comparable with a full phased array, where N is the number of the array elements. The disadvantage of the proposed system is that its field of view in one delay-configuration is smaller than a standard full phased array. However, by adjusting the delay for each element within each group, the beam can be steered to cover the same field of view as the standard fully-filled phased array. The LPSSTA system might be useful for 3D ultrasound imaging.

Citation Download Citation

Ying Li, Michael C. Kolios, and Yuan Xu "Large-pitch steerable synthetic transmit aperture imaging (LPSSTA) ", Proc. SPIE 9790, Medical Imaging 2016: Ultrasonic Imaging and Tomography, 97901Y (1 April 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2216908

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