A Novel Approach to Tele-Ultrasound Imaging: Compressive Beamforming in Fourier Domain for Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

Tele-ultrasound imaging is useful in various situations. Plane wave imaging provides a method for ultrafast ultrasound with very high frame rates, which sacrifices image quality and leads to the problem of a large amount of data and low signal transmission speed in telemedicine imaging. In this paper, a novel compressive frequency-wavenumber domain beamforming method is introduced, which integrates Stolt’s f-k method and compressed sensing theory on the lateral wavenumber. The data load is reduced by the sparsity of the echo signal parallel to the transducer, which requires a smaller measurement matrix during compressed sensing to reduce memory usage and accelerate the transmission rate. The signal is compressed in the Fourier domain to obtain greater stability and better image quality after reconstruction than if it was compressed in the temporal domain. Simulated data and experimental acquisitions were used to compare compressive Fourier domain beamforming with conventional delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming. The results showed that compressive beamforming within the wavenumber domain provides the image with higher quality from less data.