Analytic Design of Sparse Rectangular Arrays for 3D Medical Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

3D ultrasound imaging with 2D transducer arrays of large number of elements suffers from high hardware and computational complexity. In order to reduce the number of active channels, various sparse 2D array designs were presented. However, the proposed designs so far have either irregular element distribution that cannot guarantee uniformity among the scan lines or lack of analysis. In this study, a generalized sparse rectangular array (SRA) is presented, and a design rule that avoids common grating lobes of the transmit and receive SRA pairs is derived by analyzing the beam patterns. The continuous wave (CW) and pulsed wave responses of the SRA pairs are simulated to verify the proposed design rule.