Abstract
Ultrasonic imaging is one of the most important techniques to help medical diagnosis. However, obtaining high quality images requires the acquisition, processing, and storage of a large amount of data. In this work, we evaluated a new ultrasound imaging technique based on plane wave and sparse arrays to increase the scan rate and reduce the amount of data amount to be stored. The performance of the proposed method was tested using simulated echo data (from Field II) and phantom data acquired using a Verasonics system equipped with a L11-4v linear array transducer. The tests were done using 128 elements for transmission and 128, 65, 44, and 23 elements sparsely distributed for reception. The simulated data were compared with images obtained with the Delay and Sum (DAS) method and the experimental data were compared with those acquired from Verasonics. The obtained results using the Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) criteria at −6 dB showed that the images generated by the proposed method were similar in terms of resolutions (axial and lateral) and contrast to the simulated and the Verasonics commercial ones, indicating that the sparse reception proposed method is suitable for ultrasound imaging.
Highlights
Images of tissues and human organs might be acquired through several methods such as X-ray, tomography, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound [1]
The obtained results using the Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) criteria at −6 dB showed that the images generated by the proposed method were similar in terms of resolutions and contrast, mainly using 65 active elements, to the simulated and the Verasonics commercial ones, indicating that the sparse reception proposed method is suitable for ultrasound imaging
The use of plane waves without angles to excite the transducer elements might result in a low-quality image, where it is difficult to identify the image contours, mainly when receiving data using sparse arrays
Summary
Images of tissues and human organs might be acquired through several methods such as X-ray, tomography, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound [1]. The ones that use the resonance and tomography techniques present an elevated quality on the final image exhibited by the equipment. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the ultrasound (US) technique has been considered one of the most important imaging techniques to support clinical diagnosis in comparison with other methods that involve an invasive analysis with surgical procedures or images that are generated through ionizing radiations [2]. In 1996, the US was already considered as the second most important modality for acquiring medical images to help in diagnosis, being surpassed only by the
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