Frame rate improvement in ultrafast coherent plane wave compounding

Abstract

Coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC), as an ultrafast ultrasound imaging technique, makes a significant breakthrough in frame rate enhancement. However, there exists a compromise between the quality of the final image and the frame rate in CPWC. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to minimize the number of required emissions, and consequently, improve the frame rate, while maintaining the image quality. To this end, we down-sample the angle interval using two specific sampling factors. More precisely, we construct two different subsets, each of which consists of a few numbers of emissions. The optimal values of the angle intervals are achieved based on the beampattern that corresponds to the reference case (that is, the case where all plane waves are used). Finally, in order to keep the image quality comparable with the reference case, we apply some modifications to the image reconstruction procedure. In the proposed algorithm, the Delay-and-Sum beamformed images of two considered subsets are convolved to achieve the final reconstructed image. The obtained results confirm the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of frame rate improvement compared to the reference case. In particular, by using the proposed method, the required emissions in PICMUS data reduce to 16, which is 4.6 times smaller compared to the reference case. Also, the gCNR values of the proposed method and the reference case are obtained as 0.98 and 0.97, respectively, for in-vivo dataset. This demonstrates that the proposed method successfully preserves the quality of the reconstructed image by using much fewer emissions.