Beamforming of 3D ultrasound signals with full or sparse probes: New perspectives for volumetric imaging

Abstract

The advances of 2D arrays and 3D ultrasound systems open new perspectives for volumetric US imaging. Coupled with the ultrafast acquisitions, the quantity of acquired data to process expand and the beamforming could become a bottleneck in the processing, especially if volumes are reconstructed in real time. In this work, we propose to study the impact of the beamformer on 3D volumetric images, such as coherence factor, sign coherence factor, phase coherence factor or pDAS. Indeed, such beamformers, adaptive or not, can be easily transfer to 3D but their studies are limited in 3D volumetric situation. Moreover, the introduction of fully populated array required the used of advance and expensive systems. To this end, the utilisation of sparse probes is a promising solution to reduce the number of signals to manage and the complexity of the used hardware. However, the impact on the reconstructed volumes have to be evaluated and the presented beamforming strategies will be presented in both fully and sparse probes.