A Novel Spatio-Temporal DMAS (ST-DMAS) Beamforming for Sparse Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound Imaging: Initial Results

Abstract

This work reports a modified nonlinear beamforming method, named as, Spatio-Temporal Delay Multiply and Sum (ST-DMAS). The developed ST-DMAS method was investigated on a sparse-transmit Synthetic Transmit Aperture technique (sparse-STA) that used just 8 transmits to form the final Ultrasound (US) image. This method allows for achieving high-quality imaging with improved frame rates. The different methods of Delay and Sum (DAS), Filtered Delay Multiply and Sum (F-DMAS) and ST-DMAS were compared in terms of Lateral Resolution (LR), Axial Resolution (AR), Contrast Ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) in experimental studies. Experimental results show that ST-DMAS resulted in improvements of AR by 57 % and 49 %, LR by 61 % and 55 %, CR by 74 % and 43 %, and CNR by 45 % and 32 % in comparison to images reconstructed using DAS and F-DMAS, respectively. Hence, a conclusion can be drawn that both the image quality and frame rate of an US system can be improved by ST-DMAS compared to DAS and F-DMAS.